ernest hemingway essay

Advertisement

The art of the short story, issue 79, spring 1981.

In March, 1959, Ernest Hemingway’s publisher Charles Scribner, Jr. suggested putting together a student’s edition of Hemingway short stories. He listed the twelve stories which were most in demand for anthologies, but thought that the collection could include Hemingway’s favorites, and that Hemingway could write a preface for classroom use. Hemingway responded favorably. He would write the preface in the form of a lecture on the art of the short story.

Hemingway worked on the preface at La Consula, the home of Bill and Annie Davis in Malaga. He was in Spain that summer to follow the  mano a mano  competition between the brother-in-law bullfighters, Dominguín and Ordóñez. Hemingway traveled with his friend, Antonio Ordóñez, and wrote about this rivalry in “The Dangerous Summer,” a three-part article which appeared in  Life .

The first draft of the preface was written in May, and Hemingway completed the piece during the respite after Ordóñez was gored on May 30th. His wife, Mary, typed the draft, and, as she wrote in her book  How It Was , she did not entirely approve of it. She wrote her husband a note suggesting rewrites and cuts to remove some of what she felt was its boastful, smug, and malicious tone. But Hemingway made only minor changes.

Hemingway sent the introduction to Charles Scribner and proposed changing the book to a collection for the general public. Scribner agreed to the change. However, he diplomatically suggested not printing the preface as it stood, but rather using only the relevant comments as introductory remarks to the individual stories. Scribner felt that the preface, written as a lecture for college students, would not be accepted by a reading audience which might well “misinterpret it as condescension.” [Scribner to E.H. June 24, 1959.] 

The idea of the book was dropped.

Hemingway wrote the preface as if it were an extemporaneous oral presentation before a class on the methods of short story writing. It is similar to a transcript of an informal talk. Judging it against literary standards, or using it to assess Hemingway’s literary capabilities would elevate it beyond this level, and would be inappropriate. Both Hemingway’s wife and his publisher were against its publication, and in the end Hemingway agreed. It appears here because of its content. Hemingway relates the circumstances under which he wrote the short stories; he gives opinion on other writers, critics, and on his own works; he expresses views on the art of the short story.

The essay is published unedited except for some spelling corrections. A holograph manuscript, two type scripts and an addendum, written for other possible selections for the book are in the Hemingway Collection at the John F. Kennedy Library.

Gertrude Stein who was sometimes very wise said to me on one of her wise days, “Remember, Hemingway, that remarks are not literature.” The following remarks are not intended to be nor do they pretend to be literature. They are meant to be instructive, irritating and informative. No writer should be asked to write solemnly about what he has written. Truthfully yes. Solemnly, no. Should we begin in the form of a lecture designed to counteract the many lectures you will have heard on the art of the short story?

Many people have a compulsion to write. There is no law against it and doing it makes them happy while they do it and presumably relieves them. Given editors who will remove the worst of their emissions, supply them with spelling and syntax and help them shape their thoughts and their beliefs, some compulsory writers attain a temporary fame. But when shit, or  merde —a word which teacher will explain—is cut out of a book, the odor of it always remains perceptible to anyone with sufficient olfactory sensibility.

The compulsory writer would be advised not to attempt the short story. Should he make the attempt, he might well suffer the fate of the compulsive architect, which is as lonely an end as that of the compulsive bassoon player. Let us not waste our time considering the sad and lonely ends of these unfortunate creatures, gentlemen. Let us continue the exercise.

Are there any questions? Have you mastered the art of the short story? Have I been helpful? Or have I not made myself clear? I hope so.

Gentlemen, I will be frank with you. The masters of the short story come to no good end. You query this? You cite me Maugham? Longevity, gentlemen, is not an end. It is a prolongation. I cannot say fie upon it, since I have never fie-ed on anything yet. Shuck it off, Jack. Don’t fie on it.

Should we abandon rhetoric and realize at the same time that what is the most authentic hipster talk of today is the twenty-three skidoo of tomorrow? We should? What intelligent young people you are and what a privilege it is to be with you. Do I hear a request for authentic ballroom bananas? I do? Gentlemen, we have them for you in bunches.

Actually, as writers put it when they do not know how to begin a sentence, there is very little to say about writing short stories unless you are a professional explainer. If you can do it, you don’t have to explain it. If you can not do it, no explanation will ever help.

A few things I have found to be true. If you leave out important things or events that you know about, the story is strengthened. If you leave or skip something because you do not know it, the story will be worthless. The test of any story is how very good the stuff is that you, not your editors, omit. A story in this book called “Big Two-Hearted River” is about a boy coming home beat to the wide from a war. Beat to the wide was an earlier and possibly more severe form of beat, since those who had it were unable to comment on this condition and could not suffer that it be mentioned in their presence. So the war, all mention of the war, anything about the war, is omitted. The river was the Fox River, by Seney, Michigan, not the Big Two-Hearted. The change of name was made purposely, not from ignorance nor carelessness but because Big Two-Hearted River is poetry, and because there were many Indians in the story, just as the war was in the story, and none of the Indians nor the war appeared. As you see, it is very simple and easy to explain.

In a story called “A Sea Change,” everything is left out. I had seen the couple in the Bar Basque in St.-Jean-de-Luz and I knew the story too too well, which is the squared root of well, and use any well you like except mine. So I left the story out. But it is all there. It is not visible but it is there.

It is very hard to talk about your work since it implies arrogance or pride. I have tried to get rid of arrogance and replace it with humility and I do all right at that sometimes, but without pride I would not wish to continue to live nor to write and I publish nothing of which I am not proud. You can take that any way you like, Jack. I might not take it myself. But maybe we’re built different.

Another story is “Fifty Grand.” This story originally started like this:

“‘How did you handle Benny so easy, Jack?’ Soldier asked him.

“‘Benny’s an awful smart boxer,’ Jack said. ‘All the time he’s in there, he’s thinking. All the time he’s thinking, I was hitting him.’”

I told this story to Scott Fitzgerald in Paris before I wrote “Fifty Grand” trying to explain to him how a truly great boxer like Jack Britton functioned. I wrote the story opening with that incident and when it was finished I was happy about it and showed it to Scott. He said he liked the story very much and spoke about it in so fulsome a manner that I was embarrassed. Then he said, “There is only one thing wrong with it, Ernest, and I tell you this as your friend. You have to cut out that old chestnut about Britton and Leonard.”

At that time my humility was in such ascendance that I thought he must have heard the remark before or that Britton must have said it to someone else. It was not until I had published the story, from which I had removed that lovely revelation of the metaphysics of boxing that Fitzgerald in the way his mind was functioning that year so that he called an historic statement an “old chestnut” because he had heard it once and only once from a friend, that I realized how dangerous that attractive virtue, humility, can be. So do not be too humble, gentlemen. Be humble after but not during the action. They will all con you, gentlemen. But sometimes it is not intentional. Sometimes they simply do not know. This is the saddest state of writers and the one you will most frequently encounter. If there are no questions, let us press on.

My loyal and devoted friend Fitzgerald, who was truly more interested in my own career at this point than in his own, sent me to  Scribner’s  with the story. It had already been turned down by Ray Long of  Cosmopolitan Magazine  because it had no love interest. That was okay with me since I eliminated any love interest and there were, purposely, no women in it except for two broads. Enter two broads as in Shakespeare, and they go out of the story. This is unlike what you will hear from your instructors, that if a broad comes into a story in the first paragraph, she must reappear later to justify her original presence. This is untrue, gentlemen. You may dispense with her, just as in life. It is also untrue that if a gun hangs on the wall when you open up the story, it must be fired by page fourteen. The chances are, gentlemen, that if it hangs upon the wall, it will not even shoot. If there are no questions, shall we press on? Yes, the unfireable gun may be a symbol. That is true. But with a good enough writer, the chances are some jerk just hung it there to look at. Gentlemen, you can’t be sure. Maybe he is queer for guns, or maybe an interior decorator put it there. Or both.

So with pressure by Max Perkins on the editor,  Scribner’s Magazine  agreed to publish the story and pay me two hundred and fifty dollars, if I would cut it to a length where it would not have to be continued into the back of the book. They call magazines books. There is significance in this but we will not go into it. They are not books, even if they put them in stiff covers. You have to watch this, gentlemen. Anyway, I explained without heat nor hope, seeing the built-in stupidity of the editor of the magazine and his intransigence, that I had already cut the story myself and that the only way it could be shortened by five hundred words and make sense was to amputate the first five hundred. I had often done that myself with stories and it improved them. It would not have improved this story but I thought that was their ass not mine. I would put it back together in a book. They read differently in a book anyway. You will learn about this.

No, gentlemen, they would not cut the first five hundred words. They gave it instead to a very intelligent young assistant editor who assured me he could cut it with no difficulty. That was just what he did on his first attempt, and any place he took words out, the story no longer made sense. It had been cut for keeps when I wrote it, and afterwards at Scott’s request I’d even cut out the metaphysics which, ordinarily, I leave in. So they quit on it finally and eventually, I understand, Edward Weeks got Ellery Sedgwick to publish it in the  Atlantic Monthly . Then everyone wanted me to write fight stories and I did not write any more fight stories because I tried to write only one story on anything, if I got what I was after, because Life is very short if you like it and I knew that even then. There are other things to write about and other people who write very good fight stories. I recommend to you “The Professional” by W. C. Heinz.

Yes, the confidently cutting young editor became a big man on  Reader’s Digest . Or didn’t he? I’ll have to check that. So you see, gentlemen, you never know and what you win in Boston you lose in Chicago. That’s symbolism, gentlemen, and you can run a saliva test on it. That is how we now detect symbolism in our group and so far it gives fairly satisfactory results. Not complete, mind you. But we are getting in to see our way through. Incidently, within a short time  Scribner’s Magazine  was running a contest for long short stories that broke back into the back of the book, and paying many times two hundred and fifty dollars to the winners.

Now since I have answered your perceptive questions, let us take up another story.

This story is called “The Light of the World.” I could have called it “Behold I Stand at the Door and Knock” or some other stained-glass window title, but I did not think of it and actually “The Light of the World” is better. It is about many things and you would be ill-advised to think it is a simple tale. It is really, no matter what you hear, a love letter to a whore named Alice who at the time of the story would have dressed out at around two hundred and ten pounds. Maybe more. And the point of it is that nobody, and that goes for you, Jack, knows how we were then from how we are now. This is worse on women than on us, until you look into the mirror yourself some day instead of looking at women all the time, and in writing the story I was trying to do something about it. But there are very few basic things you can do anything about. So I do what the French call  constater . Look that up. That is what you have to learn to do, and you ought to learn French anyway if you are going to understand short stories, and there is nothing rougher than to do it all the way. It is hardest to do about women and you must not worry when they say there are no such women as those you wrote about. That only means your women aren’t like their women. You ever see any of their women, Jack? I have a couple of times and you would be appalled and I know you don’t appall easy.

What I learned constructive about women, not just ethics like never blame them if they pox you because somebody poxed them and lots of times they don’t even know they have it—that’s in the first reader for squares—is, no matter  how  they get, always think of them the way they were on the best day they ever had in their lives. That’s about all you can do about it and that is what I was trying for in the story.

Now there is another story called “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.” Jack, I get a bang even yet from just writing the titles. That’s why you write, no matter what they tell you. I’m glad to be with somebody I know now and those feecking students have gone. They haven’t? Okay. Glad to have them with us. It is in you that our hope is. That’s the stuff to feed the troops. Students, at ease.

This is a simple story in a way, because the woman who I knew very well in real life but then invented of, to make the woman for this story, is a bitch for the full course and doesn’t change. You’ll probably never meet the type because you haven’t got the money. I haven’t either but I get around. Now this woman doesn’t change. She has been better, but she will never be any better anymore. I invented her complete with handles from the worst bitch I knew (then) and when I first knew her she’d been lovely. Not my dish, not my pigeon, not my cup of tea, but lovely for what she was and I was her all of the above which is whatever you make of it. This is as close as I can put it and keep it clean. This information is what you call the background of a story. You throw it all away and invent from what you know. I should have said that sooner. That’s all there is to writing. That, a perfect ear—call it selective—absolute pitch, the devotion to your work and respect for it that a priest of God has for his, and then have the guts of a burglar, no conscience except to writing, and you’re in gentlemen. It’s easy. Anybody can write if he is cut out for it and applies himself. Never give it a thought. Just have those few requisites. I mean the way you have to write now to handle the way now is now. There was a time when it was nicer, much nicer and all that has been well written by nicer people. They are all dead and so are their times, but they handled them very well. Those times are over and writing like that won’t help you now.

But to return to this story. The woman called Margot Macomber is no good to anybody now except for trouble. You can bang her but that’s about all. The man is a nice jerk. I knew him very well in real life, so invent him too from everything I know. So he is just how he really was, only, he is invented. The White Hunter is my best friend and he does not care what I write as long as it is readable, so I don’t invent him at all. I just disguise him for family and business reasons, and to keep him out of trouble with the Game Department. He is the furthest thing from a square since they invented the circle, so I just have to take care of him with an adequate disguise and he is as proud as though we both wrote it, which actually you always do in anything if you go back far enough. So it is a secret between us. That’s all there is to that story except maybe the lion when he is hit and I am thinking inside of him really, not faked. I can think inside of a lion, really. It’s hard to believe and it is perfectly okay with me if you don’t believe it. Perfectly. Plenty of people have used it since, though, and one boy used it quite well, making only one mistake. Making any mistake kills you. This mistake killed him and quite soon everything he wrote was a mistake. You have to watch yourself, Jack, every minute, and the more talented you are the more you have to watch these mistakes because you will be in faster company. A writer who is not going all the way up can make all the mistakes he wants. None of it matters. He doesn’t matter. The people who like him don’t matter either. They could drop dead. It wouldn’t make any difference. It’s too bad. As soon as you read one page by anyone you can tell whether it matters or not. This is sad and you hate to do it. I don’t want to be the one that tells them. So don’t make any mistakes. You see how easy it is? Just go right in there and be a writer.

That about handles that story. Any questions? No, I don’t know whether she shot him on purpose any more than you do. I could find out if I asked myself because I invented it and I could go right on inventing. But you have to know where to stop. That is what makes a short story. Makes it short at least. The only hint I could give you is that it is my belief that the incidence of husbands shot accidentally by wives who are bitches and really work at it is very low. Should we continue?

If you are interested in how you get the idea for a story, this is how it was with “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” They have you ticketed and always try to make it that you are someone who can only write about theirself. I am using in this lecture the spoken language, which varies. It is one of the ways to write, so you might as well follow it and maybe you will learn something. Anyone who can write can write spoken, pedantic, inexorably dull, or pure English prose, just as slot machines can be set for straight, percentage, give-away or stealing. No one who can write spoken ever starves except at the start. The others you can eat irregularly on. But any good writer can do them all. This is spoken, approved for over fourteen I hope. Thank you.

Anyway we came home from Africa, which is a place you stay until the money runs out or you get smacked, one year and at quarantine I said to the ship news reporters when somebody asked me what my projects were that I was going to work and when I had some more money go back to Africa. The different wars killed off that project and it took nineteen years to get back. Well it was in the papers and a really nice and really fine and really rich woman invited me to tea and we had a few drinks as well and she had read in the papers about this project, and why should I have to wait to go back for any lack of money? She and my wife and I could go to Africa any time and money was only something to be used intelligently for the best enjoyment of good people and so forth. It was a sincere and fine and good offer and I liked her very much and I turned down the offer.

So I get down to Key West and I start to think what would happen to a character like me whose defects I know, if I had accepted that offer. So I start to invent and I make myself a guy who would do what I invent. I know about the dying part because I had been through all that. Not just once. I got it early, in the middle and later. So I invent how someone I know who cannot sue me—that is me—would turn out, and put into one short story things you would use in, say, four novels if you were careful and not a spender. I throw everything I had been saving into the story and spend it all. I really throw it away, if you know what I mean. I am not gambling with it. Or maybe I am. Who knows? Real gamblers don’t gamble. At least you think they don’t gamble. They gamble, Jack, don’t worry. So I make up the man and the woman as well as I can and I put all the true stuff in and with all the load, the most load any short story ever carried, it still takes off and it flies. This makes me very happy. So I thought that and the Macomber story are as good short stories as I can write for a while, so I lose interest and take up other forms of writing.

Any questions? The leopard? He is part of the metaphysics. I did not hire out to explain that nor a lot of other things. I know, but I am under no obligation to tell you. Put it down to  omertà . Look that word up. I dislike explainers, apologists, stoolies, pimps. No writer should be any one of those for his own work. This is just a little background, Jack, that won’t do either of us any harm. You see the point, don’t you? If not it is too bad.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t explain for, apologize for or pimp or tout for some other writer. I have done it and the best luck I had was doing it for Faulkner. When they didn’t know him in Europe, I told them all how he was the best we had and so forth and I over-humbled with him plenty and built him up about as high as he could go because he never had a break then and he was good then. So now whenever he has a few shots, he’ll tell students what’s wrong with me or tell Japanese or anybody they send him to, to build up our local product. I get tired of this but I figure what the hell he’s had a few shots and maybe he even believes it. So you asked me just now what I think about him, as everybody does and I always stall, so I say you know how good he is. Right. You ought to. What is wrong is he cons himself sometimes pretty bad. That may just be the sauce. But for quite a while when he hits the sauce toward the end of a book, it shows bad. He gets tired and he goes on and on, and that sauce writing is really hard on who has to read it. I mean if they care about writing. I thought maybe it would help if I read it using the sauce myself, but it wasn’t any help. Maybe it would have helped if I was fourteen. But I was only fourteen one year and then I would have been too busy. So that’s what I think about Faulkner. You ask that I sum it up from the standpoint of a professional. Very good writer. Cons himself now. Too much sauce. But he wrote a really fine story called “The Bear” and I would be glad to put it in this book for your pleasure and delight, if I had written it. But you can’t write them all, Jack.

It would be simpler and more fun to talk about other writers and what is good and what is wrong with them, as I saw when you asked me about Faulkner. He’s easy to handle because he talks so much for a supposed silent man. Never talk. Jack, if you are a writer, unless you have the guy write it down and have you go over it. Otherwise, they get it wrong. That’s what you think until they play a tape back at you. Then you know how silly it sounds. You’re a writer aren’t you? Okay, shut up and write. What was that question?

Want to keep reading? Subscribe and save 33%.

Subscribe now, already a subscriber sign in below..

Link your subscription

Forgot password?

Featured Audio

Season 4 trailer.

The Paris Review Podcast returns with a new season, featuring the best interviews, fiction, essays, and poetry from America’s most legendary literary quarterly, brought to life in sound. Join us for intimate conversations with Sharon Olds and Olga Tokarczuk; fiction by Rivers Solomon, Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, and Zach Williams; poems by Terrance Hayes and Maggie Millner; nonfiction by Robert Glück, Jean Garnett, and Sean Thor Conroe; and performances by George Takei, Lena Waithe, and many others. Catch up on earlier seasons, and listen to the trailer for Season 4 now.

Suggested Reading

Self-Portrait in the Studio

“I do not think we can pick up a book we love without feeling our heart racing, or truly know a creature or thing without being reborn in them and with them.”

First Person

The art of editing no. 4.

By the time I arrived in New York in the late seventies, Lapham was established in the city’s editorial elite, up there with William Shawn at The New Yorker and Barbara Epstein and Bob Silvers at The New York Review of Books . He was a glamorous fixture at literary parties and a regular at Elaine’s. In 1988, he raised plutocratic hackles by publishing Money and Class in America , a mordant indictment of our obsession with wealth. For a brief but glorious couple of years, he hosted a literary chat show on public TV called Bookmark , trading repartee with guests such as Joyce Carol Oates, Gore Vidal, Alison Lurie, and Edward Said. All the while, a new issue of Harper’s would hit the newsstands every month, with a lead essay by Lapham that couched his erudite observations on American society and politics in Augustan prose.

Today Lapham is the rare surviving eminence from that literary world. But he has managed to keep a handsome bit of it alive—so I observed when I went to interview him last summer in the offices of Lapham’s , a book-filled, crepuscular warren on a high floor of an old building just off Union Square. There he presides over a compact but bustling editorial operation, with an improbably youthful crew of subeditors. One LQ intern, who had also done stints at other magazines, told me that Lapham was singular among top editors for the personal attention he showed to each member of his staff.

Our conversation took place over several sessions, each around ninety minutes. Despite the heat, he was always impeccably attired: well-tailored blue blazer, silk tie, cuff links, and elegant loafers with no socks. He speaks in a relaxed baritone, punctuated by an occasional cough of almost orchestral resonance—a product, perhaps, of the Parliaments he is always dashing outside to smoke. The frequency with which he chuckles attests to a vision of life that is essentially comic, in which the most pervasive evils are folly and pretension.

I was familiar with such aspects of the Lapham persona. But what surprised me was his candid revelation of the struggle and self-doubt that lay behind what I had imagined to be his effortlessness. Those essays, so coolly modulated and intellectually assured, are the outcome of a creative process filled with arduous redrafting, rejiggering, revision, and last-minute amendment in the teeth of the printing press. And it is a creative process that always begins—as it did with his model, Montaigne—not with a dogmatic axiom to be unpacked but in a state of skeptical self-questioning: What do I really know? If there a unifying core to Lapham’s dual career as an editor and an essayist, that may be it.

— Jim Holt

From the Archive, Issue 229

Subscribe for free:  Apple Podcasts  |  Spotify  |  Amazon Music

You are using an outdated browser. Please upgrade your browser to improve your experience and security.

Enhanced Page Navigation

• Article about Ernest Hemingway: A case of identity: Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway

A case of identity: Ernest Hemingway

by Anders Hallengren *

The recognition of Hemingway as a major and representative writer of the United States of America, was a slow but explosive process. His emergence in the western canon was an even more adventurous voyage. His works were burnt in the bonfire in Berlin on May 10, 1933 as being a monument of modern decadence. That was a major proof of the writer’s significance and a step toward world fame.

To read Hemingway has always produced strong reactions. When his parents received the first copies of their son’s book In Our Time (1924), they read it with horror. Furious, his father sent the volumes back to the publisher, as he could not tolerate such filth in the house. Hemingway’s apparently coarse, crude, vulgar and unsentimental style and manners appeared equally shocking to many people outside his family. On the other hand, this style was precisely the reason why a great many other people liked his work. A myth, exaggerating those features, was to be born.

Hemingway in our time

After he had committed suicide at Ketchum, Idaho, in 1961, the literary position of the 1954 Nobel Laureate changed significantly and has, in a way, even become stronger. This is partly due to several posthumous works and collections that show the author’s versatility – A Moveable Feast (1964), By-Line (1967), 88 Poems (1979), and Selected Letters (1981). It is also the result of painstaking and successful Hemingway research, in which The Hemingway Society (USA) has played an important role since 1980.

Another result of this enduring interest is that many new aspects of Hemingway’s life and works that were previously obscured by his public image have now emerged into the light. On the other hand, posthumously published novels, such as Islands in the Stream (1970) and The Garden of Eden (1986), have disappointed many of the old Hemingway readers. However, rather than bearing witness to declining literary power, (which, considering the author’s declining health would, indeed, be a rather trivial observation even if it were true) the late works confront us with a reappraisal and reconsideration of basic values. They also display an unbiased seeking and experimentation, as if the author was losing both his direction and his footing, or was becoming unrestrained in a new way. Just as modern Hemingway scholarship has added immensely to the depth of our understanding of Hemingway – making him more and more difficult to define! – these works reveal and stress a complexity that may cause bewilderment or relief, depending on what perspective one adopts.

The “hard-boiled” style

The slang word “hard-boiled”, used to describe characters and works of art, was a product of twentieth century warfare. To be “hard-boiled” meant to be unfeeling, callous, coldhearted, cynical, rough, obdurate, unemotional, without sentiment. Later to become a literary term, the word originated in American Army World War I training camps, and has been in common, colloquial usage since about 1930.

Contemporary literary criticism regarded Ernest Hemingway’s works as marked by his use of this style, which was typical of the era. Indeed, in many respects they were regarded as the embodiment and symbol of hard-boiled literature.

However, neither Hemingway the man nor Hemingway the writer should be labeled “hard-boiled” – his style is the only aspect that deserves this epithet, and even that is ambiguous. Let us get down to basics, concentrate on one main feature in his literary style, and then turn to the alleged hard-boiled mind behind it, and his macho style of living and speaking.

A hard-boiled mind?

An unmatched introduction to Hemingway’s particular skill as a writer is the beginning of A Farewell to Arms, certainly one of the most pregnant opening paragraphs in the history of the modern American novel. In that passage the power of concentration reaches a peak, forming a vivid and charged sequence, as if it were a 10-second video summary. It is packed with events and excitement, yet significantly frosty, as if unresponsive and numb, like a silent flashback dream sequence in which bygone images return, pass in review and fade away, leaving emptiness and quietude behind them. The lapidary writing approaches the highest style of poetry, vibrant with meaning and emotion, while the pace is maintained by the exclusion of any descriptive redundancy, of obtrusive punctuation, and of superfluous or narrowing emotive signs:

IN the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterwards the road bare and white except for the leaves.

At the end of the sixteenth chapter of Death in the Afternoon the author approaches a definition of the “hard-boiled” style:

“If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things.”

Ezra Pound taught him “to distrust adjectives” ( A Moveable Feast ). That meant creating a style in accordance with the esthetics and ethics of raising the emotional temperature towards the level of universal truth by shutting the door on sentiment, on the subjective.

A macho style of living and speaking.

The unwritten code

Later biographic research revealed, behind the macho façade of boxing, bullfighting, big-game hunting and deep-sea fishing he built up, a sensitive and vulnerable mind that was full of contradictions.

In Hemingway, sentimentality, sympathy, and empathy are turned inwards, not restrained, but vibrant below and beyond the level of fact and fable. The reader feels their presence although they are not visible in the actual words. That is because of Hemingway’s awareness of the relation between the truth of facts and events and his conviction that they produce corresponding emotions.

“Find what gave you the emotion; what the action was that gave you the excitement. Then write it down making it clear so the reader will see it too and have the same feeling as you had.”

That was the essence of his style, to focus on facts. Hemingway aimed at “the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or in ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always” ( Death in the Afternoon ). In Hemingway, we see a reaction against Romantic turgidity and vagueness: back to basics, to the essentials. Thus his new realism in a new key resembles the old Puritan simplicity and discipline; both of them refrained from exhibiting the sentimental, the relative.

Hemingway’s sincere and stern ambition was to approach Truth, clinging to an as yet unwritten code, a higher law which he referred to as “an absolute conscience as unchanging as the standard meter in Paris” ( Green Hills of Africa , I: 1).

Hemingway’s near-death experience

Though Hemingway seems to have seen himself and life in general reflected in war, he himself never became reconciled to it. His mind was in a state of civil war, fighting demons inwardly as well as outwardly. In the long run defeat is as revealing and fundamental as victory: we are all losers, defeated by death. To live is the only way to face the ordeal, and the ultimate ordeal in our lives is the opposite of life. Hence Hemingway’s obsession with death. Deep sea fishing, bull-fighting, boxing, big-game hunting, war, – all are means of ritualizing the death struggle in his mind – it is very explicit in books such as A Farewell to Arms and Death in the Afternoon, which were based on his own experience.

Escaping death during World War I.

Modern investigations into so-called Near-Death Experiences (NDE) such as those by Raymond Moody, Kenneth Ring and many others, have focused on a pattern of empirical knowledge gained on the threshold of death; a dream-like encounter with unknown border regions. There is a parallel in Hemingway’s life, connected with the occasion when he was seriously wounded at midnight on July 8, 1918, at Fossalta di Piave in Italy and nearly died. He was the first American to be wounded in Italy during World War I. Here is a case of NDE in Hemingway, and I think that is of basic importance, pertinent to the understanding of all Hemingway’s work. In A Farewell to Arms, an experience of this sort occurs to the ambulance driver Frederic Henry, Hemingway’s alter ego, wounded in the leg by shellfire in Italy. (Concerning the highly autobiographical nature of A Farewell to Arms, see Michael S. Reynolds’s documentary work Hemingway’s First War: The Making of A Farewell to Arms, Princeton University Press 1976). As regards the NDE, we can note the incidental expression “to go out in a blaze of light” (letter to his family, Milan Oct. 18, 1918), and the long statement about what had occurred: Milan, July 21, 1918 ( Selected Letters, ed. Carlos Baker, 1981).

Hemingway touched on that crucial experience in his life – what he had felt and thought – in the short story “Now I Lay Me” (1927):

“my soul would go out of my body … I had been blown up at night and felt it go out of me and go off and then come back”

– and again, briefly, in In Our Time in the lines on the death of Maera. It reappears, in another setting and form, in the image of immortality in the African story The Snows of Kilimanjaro, where the dying Harry knows he is going to the peak called “Ngàje Ngài”, which means, as explained in Hemingway’s introductory note, “the House of God”.

The coyote and the leopard

Hemingway’s seeming insensitive detachment is only superficial, a compulsive avoidance of the emotional, but not of the emotionally tinged or charged. The pattern of his rigid, dispassionate compressed style of writing and way of life gives a picture of a touching Jeremiad of human tragedy. Hemingway’s probe touches nerves, and they hurt. But through the web of failure and disillusion there emerges a picture of human greatness, of confidence even.

Hemingway was not the Nihilist he has often been called. As he belonged to the Protestant nay-saying tradition of American dissent, the spirit of the American Revolution, he denied the denial and acceded to the basic truth which he found in the human soul: the will to live, the will to persevere, to endure, to defy. The all-pervading sense of loss is, indirectly, affirmative. Hemingway’s style is a compulsive suppression of unbearable and inexpressible feelings in the chaotic world of his times, where courage and independence offered a code of survival. Sentiments are suppressed to the boil.

The frontier mentality had become universal – the individual is on his own, like a Pilgrim walking into the unknown with neither shelter nor guidance, thrown upon his own resources, his strength and his judgment. Hemingway’s style is the style of understatement since his hero is a hero of action, which is the human condition.

There is an illuminating text in William James (1842-1910) which is both significant and reminiscent, bridging the gap between Puritan moralism, its educational parables and exempla, and lost-generation turbulent heroism. In a letter written in Yosemite Valley to his son, Alexander, William James wrote:

“I saw a moving sight the other morning before breakfast in a little hotel where I slept in the dusty fields. The young man of the house had shot a little wolf called coyote in the early morning. The heroic little animal lay on the ground, with his big furry ears, and his clean white teeth, and his jolly cheerful little body, but his brave little life was gone. It made me think how brave all these living things are. Here little coyote was, without any clothes or house or books or anything, with nothing but his own naked self to pay his way with, and risking his life so cheerfully – and losing it – just to see if he could pick up a meal near the hotel. He was doing his coyote-business like a hero, and you must do your boy-business, and I my man-business bravely, too, or else we won’t be worth as much as a little coyote.” ( The Letters of William James, ed. Henry James, Little, Brown and Co.: Boston 1926.)

The courageous coyote thus serves as a moral example, illustrating a philosophy of life which says that it is worth jeopardizing life itself to be true to one’s own nature. That is precisely the point of the frozen leopard close to the western summit of Kilimanjaro in Hemingway’s famous short story. That is the explanation of what the leopard was seeking at that altitude, and the answer was given time and again in the works of Ernest Hemingway.

Jeopardizing life itself to be true to one’s own nature.

But what about the ugliness, then? What about all the evil, the crude, the rude, the rough, the vulgar aspects of his work, even the horror, which dismayed people? How could all that be compatible with moral standards? He justified the inclusion of such aspects in a letter to his “Dear Dad” in 1925:

“The reason I have not sent you any of my work is because you or Mother sent back the In Our Time books. That looked as though you did not want to see any. You see I am trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across – not to just depict life – or criticize it – but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing. You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful you can’t believe in it. Things aren’t that way. It is only by showing both sides – 3 dimensions and if possible 4 that you can write the way I want to.

So when you see anything of mine that you don’t like remember that I’m sincere in doing it and that I’m working toward something. If I write an ugly story that might be hateful to you or to Mother the next one might be one that you would like exceedingly.”

Hemingway family photo, 1909.

Merging gender in Eden

Like many other of his works, True at First Light was a blend of autobiography and fiction in which the author identified with the first person narrator. The author, who never kept a journal or wrote an autobiography in his life, draws on experience for his realism, slightly transforming events in his life. In this sense, the posthumous novel Islands in the Stream is in some places neither fictional nor fictitious. The Garden of Eden , however, a book brimming with the author’s vulnerability just as A Farewell to Arms is, treats intimate and delicate matters. It is a story told in the third person, as are all his major works. Thus we get to know the writer David Bourne, assuredly an explorer like Daniel Boone, on his adventurous Mediterranean honeymoon.

The anti-hero’s wife in The Garden of Eden, Catherine Bourne, is one of the most persuasive and lively heroines in Hemingway’s works. She is depicted with fascination and fear, like Marcel Proust’s Albertine and, at least in name, she reminds us of the strong and attractive Catherine Barkley (alias the seven-year-older Agnes Von Kurowsky), the Red Cross heroine in A Farewell to Arms. The former character is much more complex and difficult to define, however, and her ardor and the fire of marital love prove consuming and transmogrifying.

Living at the Grau (“canal”) du Roi, on the shores of the stream that runs from Aigues-Mortes straight down to the sea, the newly wedded couple in The Garden of Eden live in a borderland where “water” and “death” are key words, and where connotations like L’eau du Léthe present themselves: Eros and Thanatos, love and death, paradise and trespass.

In this innocent borderland, moral limits are immediately extended, and conventional roles are reversed. Sipping his post-coital fine à l’eau in the afternoon, David Bourne feels relieved of all the problems he had before his marriage, and has no thought of “writing nor anything but being with this girl,” who absorbs him and assumes command. Then the blond, sun-tanned Catherine appears with her hair “cropped as short as a boy’s,” declaring:

“now I am a boy … You see why it’s dangerous, don’t you? … Why do we have to go by everyone else’s rules? We’re us … Please understand and love me … I am Peter … You’re my beautiful lovely Catherine.”

From that moment the tables are turned. David-Catherine accepts and submits, and Catherine-Peter takes over the man’s role. She mounts him in bed at night, and penetrates him in conjugal bliss:

“He had shut his eyes and he could feel the long light weight of her on him … and then lay back in the dark and did not think at all and only felt the weight and the strangeness inside and she said: ‘Now you can’t tell who is who can you?”

Ernest Hemingway, 1901.

The father in the garden

Women with a gamin hairstyle, lovers who cut and dye their hair and change sexual roles, are themes that, with variations, occur in his novels from A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, to the posthumous Islands in the Stream. They culminate in The Garden of Eden. When writing The Garden of Eden he appeared as a redhead one day in May 1947. When asked about it, he said he had dyed his hair by mistake. In that novel, the search for complete unity between the lovers is carried to extremes. It may seem that the halves of the primordial Androgyne of the Platonic myth (once cut in two by Zeus and ever since longing to become a complete being again) are uniting here. Set in a fictional Paradise, a Biblical “Eden”, the novel is perhaps even more a story about expulsion, the loss of innocence, and the ensuing liberation, about knowledge acquired through the Fall, which is the basis of culture, about the ordeals and the high price an author must pay to become a writer worthy of his salt. Against a mythical background, the voice of Hemingway’s father is heard, challenging his son, as did the Father in the Biblical Garden. Slightly disguised, Hemingway’s dear father, who haunted his son’s life and work even after he had shot himself in 1928, remained an internalized critic until Ernest also took his life in 1961. Hemingway’s père pressed his ambivalent son to surpass himself and produce a distinct and lively multidimensional text, – “3 dimensions and if possible 4”:

“He found he knew much more about his father than when he had first written this story and he knew he could measure his progress by the small things which made his father more tactile and to have more dimensions than he had in the story before.”

After they had committed honeymoon adultery with the girl both spouses equally love passionately, David exclaims: “We’ve been burned out … Crazy woman burned out the Bournes.” This consuming and transforming fire of love and its subsequent trials and transgressions, in the end has a purging effect on the writer, who finally, as if emerging from a chrysalis stage, rises like the Phoenix from his bed and sits down in a regenerated mood to write in a perfect style:

“He got out his pencils and a new cahier, sharpened five pencils and began to write the story of his father and the raid in the year of the Maji-Maji rebellion … David wrote steadily and well and the sentences that he had made before came to him complete and entire and he put them down, corrected them, and cut them as if he were going over proof. Not a sentence was missing … He wrote on a while longer now and there was no sign that any of it would ever cease returning to him intact.”

Maji-Maji and Mau Mau

But why is Maji-Maji so important to the author when he has attained perfection?

When Tanzania gained independence in 1961-62, President Julius Nyerere proclaimed that the new republic was the fulfillment of the Maji-Maji dream. The Maji-Maji Rebellion had been a farmers’ revolt against colonial rule in German East Africa in 1905-1907. It began in the hill country southwest of Dar es-Salaam and spread rapidly until the insurrection was finally crushed after some 70,000 Africans had been killed. The farmers challenged the German militia fearlessly, crying “Maji! Maji!” when they attacked, believing themselves to be protected from bullets and death by “magic water”. Maji is Swahili for “water” – one of the key words in Hemingway’s novel.

The conviction and purposefulness of the Maji-Maji in The Garden of Eden, corresponds to the Kenyan Mau-Mau context of the novel True at First Light, which Hemingway started writing after his East African safari in 1953. Mau Mau was an insurrection of Kikuyo farm laborers in 1952. It was led by Jomo Kenyatta, who was subsequently held in prison until he became the premier of Kenya in 1963 (and the first President of the Republic in 1964). For Kikuyo men or women (and there were several women in the movement), to join Mau Mau meant dedicating their lives to a cause and sacrificing everything else, it meant taking a sacred oath that definitely cut them off from decorum and ordinary life.

In Hemingway’s vision, Maji-Maji and Mau Mau blend with his notion of the ideal committed writer, a man who is prepared to die for his art, and for art’s sake.

In the private library of Dag Hammarskjöld , who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize after his death in the Congo (Africa) in 1961, the year Hemingway died, a copy of the beautiful original edition of A Farewell to Arms (Charles Scribner´s Sons, 1929) may still be seen (now in the Royal Library, Stockholm). In a way it is significant that the Secretary-General of the United Nations, who was dedicated to peacemaking, should have been a Hemingway reader.

* Anders Hallengren (1950-2024) was an associate professor of Comparative Literature and a research fellow in the Department of History of Literature and the History of Ideas at Stockholm University. He served as consulting editor for literature at Nobelprize.org. Dr. Hallengren was a fellow of The Hemingway Society (USA) and was on the Steering Committee for the 1993 Guilin ELT/Hemingway International Conference in the People’s Republic of China. Among his works in English are The Code of Concord: Emerson’s Search for Universal Laws; Gallery of Mirrors: Reflections of Swedenborgian Thought; and What is National Literature: Lectures on Emerson, Dostoevsky and Hemingway and the Meaning of Culture.

First published 28 August 2001

Nobel Prizes and laureates

Nobel prizes 2023.

Explore prizes and laureates

You are using an outdated browser. This site may not look the way it was intended for you. Please upgrade your browser to improve your experience and security.

London School of Journalism

• Tel: +44 (0) 20 7432 8140
• [email protected]
• Student log in

Search courses

English literature essays, introducing ernest hemingway.

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) occupies a prominent place in the annals of American Literary history by virtue of his revolutionary role in the arena of twentieth century American fiction. By rendering a realistic portrayal of the inter-war period with its disillusionment and disintegration of old values, Hemingway has presented the predicament of the modern man in 'a world which increasingly seeks to reduce him to a mechanism, a mere thing'. [1] Written in a simple but unconventional style, with the problems of war, violence and death as their themes, his novels present a symbolic interpretation of life.

Ernest Miller Hemingway was born in 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois, in an orthodox higher middle class family as the second of six children. His mother, Mrs. Grace Hale Hemingway, an ex-opera singer, was an authoritarian woman who had reduced his father, Mr. Clarence Edmunds Hemingway, a physician, to the level of a hen-pecked husband. Hemingway had a rather unhappy childhood on account of his 'mother's, bullying relations with his father'. [2] He grew up under the influence of his father who encouraged him to develop outdoor interests such as swimming, fishing and hunting. His early boyhood was spent in the northern woods of Michigan among the native Indians, where he learned the primitive aspects of life such as fear, pain, danger and death.

At school, he had a brilliant academic career and graduated at the age of 17 from the Oak Park High School. In 1917 he joined the Kansas City Star as a war correspondent. The following year he participated in the World War by volunteering to work as an ambulance driver on the Italian front, where he was badly wounded but twice decorated for his services. He returned to America in 1919 and married Hadley Richardson in 1921. This was the first of a series of unhappy marriages and divorces. The next year, he reported on the Greco-Turkish War and two years later, gave up journalism to devote himself to fiction. He settled in Paris, where he came into contact with fellow American expatriates such as Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound. 'From her (Gertrude Stein) as well as from Ezra Pound and others, he learned the discipline of his craft - the taut monosyllabic vocabulary, stark dialogue, and understated emotion that are the hallmarks of the Hemingway style'. [3]

Hemingway's first two published works were In Our Time and Three Stories and Ten Poems . These early stories foreshadow his mature technique and his concern for values in a corrupt and indifferent world. But it was The Torrents of Spring , which appeared in 1926, that established him as a writer of repute. His international reputation was firmly secured by his next three books, The Sun Also Rises, Men Without Women and A Farewell to Arms . This was only the beginning of an illustrious career, with an impressive output of several novels and short stories, a collection of poems and The Fifth Column , a play.

Hemingway was passionately involved with bullfighting, big game hunting and deep sea fishing, and his writing reflects this. He visited Spain during the Civil War and his experiences on the war front form the theme of the best seller For Whom the Bell Tolls . When the Second World War broke out, he took an active part and offered to lead a suicide squadron against the Nazi U Boats. But in the course of the war, he fell ill and was nursed by Mary Walsh, who eventually became his fourth wife and continued to be with him until his death. In 1954, he survived two plane crashes in the African jungle. His adventures and tryst with destiny made him a celebrity all over the English speaking world.

Hemingway began the final phase of his career as a resident of Cuba. There he continued his life of well advertised hunting and adventure, being often in the forefront of literary publicity and controversy. This phase is marked by a decline in his creative genius which, however, attained its original stature with the publication of The Old Man and The Sea in 1952. It was an immense success and won him the Nobel Prize for literature in 1954.

His fortunes took a turn for the worse, when Fidel Castro came to power and ordered the Americans out of Cuba. It proved a great shock to Hemingway and added to his agony over the decline of his creative talents. He fell victim to acute fits of depression and attempted suicide twice. He was hospitalized and treated for his psychological problems. But after a few months of doubts, anxieties and depression, he shot himself on the 2nd of July 1961, bringing to an end one of the most eventful and colorful lives of our times.

Hemingway's literary genius was molded by cultural and literary influences. 'Mark Twain, the War and The Bible were the major influences that shaped Hemingway's thought and art'. [4] During his sojourn in Paris, Hemingway also came into contact with eminent literary figures such as Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, D.H. Lawrence and even T.S. Eliot. 'All or some of them might have left their imprint on him'. [5] Hemingway also acknowledged that he had learnt a great deal from the writings of Joseph Conrad. Besides these, his early experiences in Michigan colored his writing to some extent. The most important influence that left a deep impact on his genius was the nightmarish experiences which he himself had undergone in the two World Wars.

As a novelist, Hemingway is often assigned a place among the writers of `the lost generation', along with Faulkner, Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos and Sinclair Lewis. 'These writers, including Ernest Hemingway, tried to show the loss the First World War had caused in the social, moral and psychological spheres of human life'. [6] They also reveal the horror, the fear and the futility of human existence. True, Hemingway has echoed the longings and frustrations that are typical of these writers, but his work is distinctly different from theirs in its philosophy of life. In his novels 'a metaphysical interest in man and his relation to nature' [7] can be discerned.

Hemingway has been immortalized by the individuality of his style. Short and solid sentences, delightful dialogues, and a painstaking hunt for an apt word or phrase to express the exact truth, are the distinguishing features of his style. He 'evokes an emotional awareness in the reader by a highly selective use of suggestive pictorial detail, and has done for prose what Eliot has done for poetry'. [8] In his accurate rendering of sensuous experience, Hemingway is a realist. As he himself has stated in Death in the Afternoon , his main concern was 'to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things were that produced the emotion you experienced'. [9] This surface realism of his works often tends to obscure the ultimate aim of his fiction. This has often resulted in the charge that there is a lack of moral vision in his novels. Leon Edel has attacked Hemingway for his `Lack of substance' as he called it. According to him, Hemingway's fiction is deficient in serious subject matter. 'It is a world of superficial action and almost wholly without reflection - such reflection as there is tends to be on a rather crude and simplified level'. [10]

But such a casual dismissal as this, presenting Hemingway as a writer devoid of `high seriousness', is not justified. Though Hemingway is apparently a realist who has a predilection for physical action, he is essentially a philosophical writer. His works should be read and interpreted in the light of his famous `Iceberg theory': 'The dignity of the movement of an iceberg is due to only one eighth of it being above the water'. [11] This statement throws light on the symbolic implications of his art. He makes use of physical action to provide a symbolical interpretation of the nature of man's existence. It can be convincingly proved that, 'While representing human life through fictional forms, he has consistently set man against the background of his world and universe to examine the human situation from various points of view'. [12]

In this aspect, he belongs to the tradition of Hawthorne, Poe and Melville, in whose fiction darkness has been used as a major theme to present the lot of man in this world. Hemingway's concern for the predicament of the individual resembles the outlook of these `nocturnal writers'. 'As with them, a moral awareness springs from his awareness of the larger life of the universe. Compared with the larger life of the universe, the individual is a puny thing, a tragic thing. But in this larger life of the universe, the individual has his place of glory'. [13] This awareness of the futility of human existence led Hemingway to deal with the themes of violence, darkness and death in his novels. By presenting the darker side of life, he tries to explore the nature of the individual's predicament in this world.

What attitude should a man take toward a world in which, for reasons of the world's own making and not of his own, he is fundamentally out of place? What personal happiness can he expect to find in a world seething with violence ... what values could one respect when ethical values as a whole seemed university disrespected? [14]

This metaphysical concern about the nature of the individual's existence in relation to the world made Hemingway conceive his protagonists as alienated individuals fighting a losing battle against the odds of life with courage, endurance and will as their only weapons. The Hemingway hero is a lonely individual, wounded either physically or emotionally. He exemplifies a code of courageous behavior in a world of irrational destruction. 'He offers up and exemplifies certain principles of honor, courage and endurance in a life of tension and pain which make a man a man'. [15] Violence, struggle, suffering and hardships do not make him in any way pessimistic. Though the `vague unknown' continues to lure him and frustrate his hopes and purposes, he does not admit defeat. Death rather than humiliation, stoical endurance rather than servile submission are the cardinal virtues of the Hemingway hero.

A close examination of Hemingway's fiction reveals that in his major novels he enacts `the general drama of human pain', and that he has 'used the novel form in order to pose symbolic questions about life'. [16] The trials and tribulations undergone by his protagonists are symbolic of man's predicament in this world. He views life as a perpetual struggle in which the individual has to assert the supremacy of his free will over forces other than himself. In order to assert the dignity of his existence, the individual has to wage a relentless battle against a world which refuses him any identity or fulfillment.

To sum up, Hemingway, in his novels and short stories, presents human life as a perpetual struggle which ends only in death. It is of no avail to fight this battle, where man is reduced to a pathetic figure by forces both within and without. However, what matters is the way man faces the crisis and endures the pain inflicted upon him by the hostile powers that be, be it his own physical limitation or the hostility of society or the indifference of unfeeling nature. The ultimate victory depends on the way one faces the struggle. In a world of pain and failure, the individual also has his own weapon to assert the dignity of his existence. He has the freedom of will to create his own values and ideals. In order to achieve this end, he has to carry on an incessant battle against three oppressive forces, namely, the biological, the social and the environmental barriers of this world. According to Hemingway, the struggle between the individual and the hostile deterministic forces takes places at these three different levels. Commenting on this aspect of the existential struggle found in Hemingway's fiction, Charles Child Walcutt has observed that, 'the conflict between the individual needs and social demands is matched by the contest between feeling man and unfeeling universe, and between the spirit of the individual and his biological limitations'. [17] This observation is probably the right key to understand Hemingway, the man and the novelist.

Endnotes 1. Cleanth Brooks, 'Ernest Hemingway, Man On His Moral Uppers' The Hidden God (New Haven and London: Yale Press, 1969), p. 6. 2. Mark Spilka, 'Hemingway and Fauntleroy, An Androgynous Pursuit', American Novelists Revisited ed. Fritz Flishmann (Boston, Massachusetts G.K. Hall and Co., 1982), p. 346. 3. Abraham H. Lass, A student's Guide to 50 American Novelists (New York: Washington Square `Press, 1970), p. 175. 4. Mrs. Mary S. David and Dr. Varshney, A History of American Literature (Barilly: Student Store, 1983), p. 315. Hereinafter cited as Mary S. David. 5. Mary S. David. p.312 6. Mary S. David. p. 315. 7. P.G. Rama Rao, Ernest Hemingway, A Study in Narrative Technique (New Delhi: S. Chand and Co., 1980). p. 4. Hereafter cited as Rama Rao. 8. Rama Rao, p. 31. 9. Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon (London: Grafton Books, 1986), p. 8. Hereafter cited as Death in the Afternoon. 10. Leon Edel, 'The Art of Evasion' in Hemingway, A Collection of Critical Essays , ed. Robert P. Weeks (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1962), p. 170. 11. Death in the Afternoon , p. 171. 12. B.R. Mullik, Hemingway Studies in American Literature (New Delhi: S. Chand and Co., 1972), p. 8. 13. Chaman Nahal, The Narrative Pattern in Ernest Hemingway's Fiction (New Delhi: Vikas Publication, 1971). p. 26. 14. W.M. Frohock, The Novel of Violence in American Literature (Cambridge, Massachusetts; Cambridge University. 15. Philip Young, 'Ernest Hemingway' Seven Modern American Novelists, an Introduction ed. William Van O' Connor (Minneapolis - The University of Minnesota Press, 1966), p. 158. Hereafter cited as Philip Young. 16. W.R. Goodman, A Manual of American Literature (Delhi: Doabe House, n.d), p. 357. Hereafter cited as Goodman 17. Charles Child Walcutt, American Literary Naturalism, A Divided Stream (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1974), p. 275.

Bibliography Brooks, Cleanth 'Ernest Hemingway, Man On His Moral Uppers' The Hidden God . New Haven and London: Yale Press, 1969. David, Mary S. and Dr. Varshney, A History of American Literature (Bareilly: Student Store, 1983. Edel, Leon 'The Art of Evasion', Hemingway, A Collection of Critical Essays , Ed. Robert P. Weeks Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1962. Frohock, W.M. The Novel of Violence in American Literature . Cambridge, Massachusetts: Cambridge University Press, 1957. Goodman, W.R. A Manual of American Literature . New Delhi: Doaba House 1968. Hemingway, Ernest. Death in the Afternoon . London: Grafton Books, 1986. Lass, Abraham H. A student's Guide to 50 American Novelists . New York: Washington Square Press, 1970. Mullik, B.R. Hemingway - Studies in American Literature New Delhi: S. Chand and Co., 1972. Nahal, Chaman. The Narrative Pattern in Ernest Hemingway's Fiction . New Delhi: Vikas Publication, 1971. Rao, P.G. Rama. Ernest Hemingway, A Study in Narrative Technique . New Delhi: S. Chand and Co., 1980. Spilka, Mark. 'Hemingway and Fauntleroy, An Androgynous Pursuit', American Novelists Revisited Ed. Fritz Flishmann .Boston: G.K. Hall and Co., 1982. Walcutt, Charles Child. American Literary Naturalism - A Divided Stream . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1974. Young, Philip. 'Ernest Hemingway', Seven Modern American Novelists,- An Introduction . Ed. William Van O' Connor. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1966.

© Februaruy 2003, Professor Ganesan Balakrishnan, Ph.D Head, PG & Research Dept. of English, Pachaiyappa's College (Affiliated to the University of Madras), Chennai-30, Tamil Nadu, India

• Aristotle: Poetics
• Matthew Arnold
• Margaret Atwood: Bodily Harm and The Handmaid's Tale
• Margaret Atwood 'Gertrude Talks Back'
• Jonathan Bayliss
• Lewis Carroll, Samuel Beckett
• Saul Bellow and Ken Kesey
• John Bunyan: The Pilgrim's Progress and Geoffrey Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales
• T S Eliot, Albert Camus
• Castiglione: The Courtier
• Kate Chopin: The Awakening
• Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness
• Charles Dickens
• John Donne: Love poetry
• John Dryden: Translation of Ovid
• T S Eliot: Four Quartets
• William Faulkner: Sartoris
• Henry Fielding
• Ibsen, Lawrence, Galsworthy
• Jonathan Swift and John Gay
• Oliver Goldsmith
• Graham Greene: Brighton Rock
• Thomas Hardy: Tess of the d'Urbervilles
• Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter
• Ernest Hemingway
• Jon Jost: American independent film-maker
• James Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Will McManus
• James Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Ian Mackean
• James Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Ben Foley
• Carl Gustav Jung
• Jamaica Kincaid, Merle Hodge, George Lamming
• Rudyard Kipling: Kim
• D. H. Lawrence: Women in Love
• Henry Lawson: 'Eureka!'
• Machiavelli: The Prince
• Jennifer Maiden: The Winter Baby
• Ian McEwan: The Cement Garden
• Toni Morrison: Beloved and Jazz
• R K Narayan's vision of life
• R K Narayan: The English Teacher
• R K Narayan: The Guide
• Brian Patten
• Harold Pinter
• Sylvia Plath and Alice Walker
• Alexander Pope: The Rape of the Lock
• Jean Rhys: Wide Sargasso Sea. Charlotte Bronte: Jane Eyre: Doubles
• Jean Rhys: Wide Sargasso Sea. Charlotte Bronte: Jane Eyre: Symbolism
• Shakespeare: Twelfth Night
• Shakespeare: Hamlet
• Shakespeare: Shakespeare's Women
• Shakespeare: Measure for Measure
• Shakespeare: Antony and Cleopatra
• Shakespeare: Coriolanus
• Shakespeare: The Winter's Tale and The Tempest
• Sir Philip Sidney: Astrophil and Stella
• Edmund Spenser: The Faerie Queene
• Tom Stoppard
• William Wordsworth
• William Wordsworth and Lucy
• Studying English Literature
• The author, the text, and the reader
• What is literary writing?
• Indian women's writing
• Renaissance tragedy and investigator heroes
• Renaissance poetry
• The Age of Reason
• Romanticism
• New York! New York!
• Alice, Harry Potter and the computer game
• The Spy in the Computer
• Photography and the New Native American Aesthetic

• History & Society
• Science & Tech
• Biographies
• Animals & Nature
• Geography & Travel
• Arts & Culture
• Games & Quizzes
• On This Day
• One Good Fact
• New Articles
• Lifestyles & Social Issues
• Philosophy & Religion
• Politics, Law & Government
• World History
• Health & Medicine
• Browse Biographies
• Birds, Reptiles & Other Vertebrates
• Bugs, Mollusks & Other Invertebrates
• Environment
• Fossils & Geologic Time
• Entertainment & Pop Culture
• Sports & Recreation
• Visual Arts
• Demystified
• Image Galleries
• Infographics
• Top Questions
• Britannica Kids
• Saving Earth
• Space Next 50
• Student Center
• Introduction & Top Questions

Young Hemingway

The making of a writer, a seminal work, the spanish influence, hemingway’s relationship to war, the hemingway legacy.

How did Ernest Hemingway influence others?

What was ernest hemingway’s childhood like, when did ernest hemingway die.

• When did American literature begin?
• Who are some important authors of American literature?

Ernest Hemingway

Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article.

• Poetry Foundation - Biography of Ernest M. Hemingway
• The Nobel Prize - Biography of Ernest Hemingway
• WyoHistory.org - Ernest Hemingway in Wyoming
• Spartacus Educational - Biography of Ernest Hemingway
• Ernest Hemingway - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up)
• Table Of Contents

What did Ernest Hemingway write?

Ernest Hemingway wrote The Sun Also Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms (1929), which were full of the existential disillusionment of the Lost Generation expatriates; For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), about the Spanish Civil War ; and the Pulitzer Prize -winning The Old Man and the Sea (1952).

Ernest Hemingway, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954, had a great impact on other writers through his deceptively simple, stripped-down prose, full of unspoken implication, and his tough but vulnerable masculinity, which created a myth that imprisoned the author and haunted the World War II generation.

Ernest Hemingway was born in a suburb of Chicago . He was educated in the public schools and began to write in high school, where he was active and outstanding. The parts of his boyhood that mattered most to him were summers spent with his family on Walloon Lake, near Petoskey , Michigan .

Having departed Cuba, his home for some 20 years, Ernest Hemingway settled in Ketchum, Idaho, in 1960 and temporarily resumed his work, but, anxiety-ridden and depressed, he was twice hospitalized at the Mayo Clinic. On July 2, 1961, he took his life with a shotgun at his house in Ketchum.

Ernest Hemingway (born July 21, 1899, Cicero [now in Oak Park], Illinois , U.S.—died July 2, 1961, Ketchum, Idaho) was an American novelist and short-story writer, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. He was noted both for the intense masculinity of his writing and for his adventurous and widely publicized life. His succinct and lucid prose style exerted a powerful influence on American and British fiction in the 20th century.

The first son of Clarence Edmonds Hemingway, a doctor, and Grace Hall Hemingway, Ernest Miller Hemingway was born in a suburb of Chicago . He was educated in the public schools and began to write in high school , where he was active and outstanding, but the parts of his boyhood that mattered most were summers spent with his family on Walloon Lake in upper Michigan . On graduation from high school in 1917, impatient for a less-sheltered environment , he did not enter college but went to Kansas City, where he was employed as a reporter for the Star .

Hemingway was repeatedly rejected for military service because of a defective eye, but he managed to enter World War I as an ambulance driver for the American Red Cross . On July 8, 1918, not yet 19 years old, he was injured on the Austro-Italian front at Fossalta di Piave. Decorated for heroism and hospitalized in Milan, he fell in love with a Red Cross nurse, Agnes von Kurowsky, who declined to marry him. These were experiences he was never to forget.

After recuperating at home, Hemingway renewed his efforts at writing, for a while worked at odd jobs in Chicago, and sailed for France as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star . Advised and encouraged by other American writers in Paris— F. Scott Fitzgerald , Gertrude Stein , Ezra Pound —he began to see his nonjournalistic work appear in print there, and in 1925 his first important book, a collection of stories called In Our Time , was published in New York City; it was originally released in Paris in 1924.

In 1926 he published The Sun Also Rises , a novel with which he scored his first solid success. A pessimistic but sparkling book, it deals with a group of aimless expatriates in France and Spain—members of the postwar Lost Generation , a phrase that Hemingway scorned while making it famous. This work also introduced him to the limelight, which he both craved and resented for the rest of his life. Hemingway’s The Torrents of Spring , a parody of the American writer Sherwood Anderson ’s book Dark Laughter , also appeared in 1926.

At least in the public view, however, the novel A Farewell to Arms (1929) overshadowed such works. Reaching back to his experience as a young soldier in Italy, Hemingway developed a grim but lyrical novel of great power , fusing love story with war story. While serving with the Italian ambulance service during World War I, the American lieutenant Frederic Henry falls in love with the English nurse Catherine Barkley, who tends him during his recuperation after being wounded . She becomes pregnant by him, but he must return to his post. Henry deserts during the Italians’ disastrous retreat after the Battle of Caporetto , and the reunited couple flee Italy by crossing the border into Switzerland. There, however, Catherine and her baby die during childbirth, and Henry is left desolate at the loss of the great love of his life.

Hemingway’s love of Spain and his passion for bullfighting resulted in Death in the Afternoon (1932), a learned study of a spectacle he saw more as tragic ceremony than as sport. Similarly, a safari he took in 1933–34 in the big-game region of Tanganyika resulted in Green Hills of Africa (1935), an account of big-game hunting. Mostly for the fishing, he purchased a house in Key West , Florida, and bought his own fishing boat. A minor novel of 1937 called To Have and Have Not is about a Caribbean desperado and is set against a background of lower-class violence and upper-class decadence in Key West during the Great Depression .

By now Spain was in the midst of civil war. Still deeply attached to that country, Hemingway made four trips there, once more a correspondent. He raised money for the Republicans in their struggle against the Nationalists under General Francisco Franco , and he wrote a play called The Fifth Column (1938), which is set in besieged Madrid. As in many of his books, the protagonist of the play is based on the author. Following his last visit to the Spanish war, he purchased Finca Vigía (“Lookout Farm”), an unpretentious estate outside Havana , Cuba , and went to cover another war—the Japanese invasion of China.

The harvest of Hemingway’s considerable experience of Spain in war and peace was the novel For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), a substantial and impressive work that some critics consider his finest novel, in preference to A Farewell to Arms . It was also the most successful of all his books as measured in sales. Set during the Spanish Civil War , it tells of Robert Jordan, an American volunteer who is sent to join a guerrilla band behind the Nationalist lines in the Guadarrama Mountains. Most of the novel concerns Jordan’s relations with the varied personalities of the band, including the girl Maria, with whom he falls in love. Through dialogue , flashbacks, and stories, Hemingway offers telling and vivid profiles of the Spanish character and unsparingly depicts the cruelty and inhumanity stirred up by the civil war. Jordan’s mission is to blow up a strategic bridge near Segovia in order to aid a coming Republican attack, which he realizes is doomed to fail. In an atmosphere of impending disaster, he blows up the bridge but is wounded and makes his retreating comrades leave him behind, where he prepares a last-minute resistance to his Nationalist pursuers.

All of his life Hemingway was fascinated by war—in A Farewell to Arms he focused on its pointlessness, in For Whom the Bell Tolls on the comradeship it creates—and, as World War II progressed, he made his way to London as a journalist. He flew several missions with the Royal Air Force and crossed the English Channel with American troops on D-Day (June 6, 1944). Attaching himself to the 22nd Regiment of the 4th Infantry Division, he saw a good deal of action in Normandy and in the Battle of the Bulge . He also participated in the liberation of Paris, and, although ostensibly a journalist, he impressed professional soldiers not only as a man of courage in battle but also as a real expert in military matters, guerrilla activities, and intelligence collection.

Following the war in Europe, Hemingway returned to his home in Cuba and began to work seriously again. He also traveled widely, and, on a trip to Africa, he was injured in a plane crash. Soon after (in 1953), he received the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for The Old Man and the Sea (1952), a short heroic novel about an old Cuban fisherman who, after an extended struggle, hooks and boats a giant marlin only to have it eaten by voracious sharks during the long voyage home. This book, which played a role in gaining for Hemingway the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954, was as enthusiastically praised as his previous novel, Across the River and into the Trees (1950), the story of a professional army officer who dies while on leave in Venice , had been damned.

By 1960 Hemingway had left Cuba and settled in Ketchum, Idaho . (He expressed his belief in what he called the “historical necessity” of the Cuban Revolution; his attitude toward its leader, Fidel Castro , who had taken power in 1959, varied.) He tried to lead his life and do his work as before. For a while he succeeded, but, anxiety-ridden and depressed, he was twice hospitalized at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, where he received electroshock treatments . Two days after his return to the house in Ketchum, he took his life with a shotgun. Hemingway had been married four times: to Hadley Richardson in 1921 (divorced 1927), Pauline Pfeiffer in 1927 (divorced 1940), Martha Gellhorn in 1940 (divorced 1945), and Mary Welsh in 1946. He had fathered three sons: John Hadley Nicanor (“Bumby”), with Hadley, born in 1923; Patrick, with Pauline, in 1928; and Gregory, also with Pauline, in 1931.

Hemingway left behind a substantial amount of manuscript, some of which has been published. A Moveable Feast , an entertaining memoir of his years in Paris (1921–26) before he was famous, was issued in 1964. Islands in the Stream , three closely related novellas growing directly out of his peacetime memories of the Caribbean island of Bimini, of Havana during World War II, and of searching for U-boats off Cuba, appeared in 1970.

Hemingway’s characters plainly embody his own values and view of life. The main characters of The Sun Also Rises , A Farewell to Arms , and For Whom the Bell Tolls are young men whose strength and self-confidence nevertheless coexist with a sensitivity that leaves them deeply scarred by their wartime experiences. War was for Hemingway a potent symbol of the world, which he viewed as complex, filled with moral ambiguities , and offering almost unavoidable pain, hurt, and destruction. To survive in such a world, and perhaps emerge victorious, one must conduct oneself with honour, courage, endurance, and dignity, a set of principles known as “the Hemingway code.” To behave well in the lonely, losing battle with life is to show “grace under pressure” and constitutes in itself a kind of victory, a theme clearly established in The Old Man and the Sea .

Hemingway’s prose style was probably the most widely imitated of any in the 20th century. He wished to strip his own use of language of inessentials, ridding it of all traces of verbosity, embellishment, and sentimentality. In striving to be as objective and honest as possible, Hemingway hit upon the device of describing a series of actions by using short, simple sentences from which all comment or emotional rhetoric has been eliminated. These sentences are composed largely of nouns and verbs, have few adjectives and adverbs, and rely on repetition and rhythm for much of their effect. The resulting terse, concentrated prose is concrete and unemotional yet is often resonant and capable of conveying great irony through understatement. Hemingway’s use of dialogue was similarly fresh, simple, and natural-sounding. The influence of this style was felt worldwide wherever novels were written, particularly from the 1930s through the ’50s.

A consummately contradictory man, Hemingway achieved a fame surpassed by few, if any, American authors of the 20th century. The virile nature of his writing, which attempted to re-create the exact physical sensations he experienced in wartime, big-game hunting, and bullfighting, in fact masked an aesthetic sensibility of great delicacy. He was a celebrity long before he reached middle age , but his popularity continues to be validated by serious critical opinion.

Visiting Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion?

You must join the virtual exhibition queue when you arrive. If capacity has been reached for the day, the queue will close early.

Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History Essays

Ernest hemingway (1899–1961) and art.

Gertrude Stein

Pablo Picasso

Still Life with a Ginger Jar and Eggplants

Paul Cézanne

Plate 15 from "The Disasters of War" (Los Desastres de la Guerra): 'And there is no help' (Y no hai remedio)

Goya (Francisco de Goya y Lucientes)

Ernest Hemingway

Yousuf Karsh

The Harvesters

Pieter Bruegel the Elder

Colette Hemingway Independent Scholar

October 2004

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) ( 1986.1098.12 ), the author of many classic works, including In Our Time, The Sun Also Rises , A Farewell to Arms , Green Hills of Africa , For Whom the Bell Tolls , The Old Man and the Sea , and The Garden of Eden , was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1954. During his early years in Paris in the 1920s, the American writer reached what some scholars consider his artistic maturity. New ways of expression and the exchange of ideas between writers, painters, dancers , and philosophers living in the city at this time nurtured the young author, leaving him with lasting impressions for his renowned short stories and novels.

Ernest and his first wife, Hadley, first came to Paris in 1921. Soon after their arrival, they became well acquainted with the other writers and many of the great masters of twentieth-century painting, among them Miró, Masson, Gris, and Picasso , with whom they shared the scene of excitement and budding accomplishment. Gertrude Stein ( 47.106 ), who was also living and writing in Paris at this time, was a close friend of Hemingway and a collector of contemporary art. Stein urged the young American writer to study the art that abounded in the city.

In 1925, Ernest and Hadley purchased Joan Miró’s painting The Farm (1921–22), now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. A few years later, Hemingway wrote an article for Cahiers d’Art about his purchase of the painting and the impact of Miró’s composition on him. This marked the beginning of the writer’s lifelong admiration for and friendship with a number of European and American painters. In 1931, Hemingway and his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, purchased The Guitar Player (1926) and The Bullfighter (1913), both by their friend Juan Gris. The latter work would be reproduced as the frontispiece for Hemingway’s treatise on bullfighting Death in the Afternoon (1932). Soon thereafter, Ernest and Pauline acquired a number of paintings by the French Surrealist André Masson, five of which are now in the Ernest Hemingway Collection at the John F. Kennedy Library, Boston.

Throughout his life, Hemingway visited art galleries and museums, some of his favorites being the Prado, the Louvre, the Accademia in Venice, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Metropolitan Museum. Along with his appreciation of European art, he expressed admiration for Winslow Homer  and owned works by the American painters Waldo Peirce and Henry Strater. Hemingway wrote commentaries on art and artists, and, in many of his works, referred to paintings by Bruegel ( 19.164 ), Bosch, Cézanne ( 61.101.4 ), Goya , Homer, and others. In his novel For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), he gives excruciating accounts of the devastation suffered on both sides during the Spanish Civil War, with many of his passages reading very much like the images depicted by Goya in his series of etchings ( 32.62.17 ) titled The Disasters of War (1810–23). In other works, Hemingway comments on Cézanne’s style and way of interpreting the world around him. The author remarked in one interview that he learned as much from painters about how to write as from writers. Painters and their works were integral to Hemingway’s learning to see, to hear, and to feel or not feel. They were part of the writer’s renowned ability to present an image hard, clear, and concentrated, using the language of ordinary speech without vague generalities, as true as a painter’s color.

Hemingway, Colette. “Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) and Art.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History . New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/hemw/hd_hemw.htm (October 2004)

Further Reading

Baker, Carlos. Hemingway, the Writer as Artist . 3d ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963.

Hemingway, Ernest. A Moveable Feast . New York: Scribner, 1964.

Hornblower, Simon, and Antony Spawforth, eds. The Oxford Classical Dictionary . 3d ed., rev. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Turner, Jane, ed. The Dictionary of Art . 34 vols. New York: Grove, 1996.

Watts, Emily Stipes. Ernest Hemingway and the Arts . Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971.

Additional Essays by Colette Hemingway

• Hemingway, Colette. “ Art of the Hellenistic Age and the Hellenistic Tradition .” (April 2007)
• Hemingway, Colette. “ Greek Hydriai (Water Jars) and Their Artistic Decoration .” (July 2007)
• Hemingway, Colette. “ Hellenistic Jewelry .” (April 2007)
• Hemingway, Colette. “ Intellectual Pursuits of the Hellenistic Age .” (April 2007)
• Hemingway, Colette. “ Mycenaean Civilization .” (October 2003)
• Hemingway, Colette. “ Retrospective Styles in Greek and Roman Sculpture .” (July 2007)
• Hemingway, Colette. “ Africans in Ancient Greek Art .” (January 2008)
• Hemingway, Colette. “ Ancient Greek Colonization and Trade and their Influence on Greek Art .” (July 2007)
• Hemingway, Colette. “ Architecture in Ancient Greece .” (October 2003)
• Hemingway, Colette. “ Greek Gods and Religious Practices .” (October 2003)
• Hemingway, Colette. “ The Art of Classical Greece (ca. 480–323 B.C.) .” (January 2008)
• Hemingway, Colette. “ The Labors of Herakles .” (January 2008)
• Hemingway, Colette. “ Athletics in Ancient Greece .” (October 2002)
• Hemingway, Colette. “ The Rise of Macedon and the Conquests of Alexander the Great .” (October 2004)
• Hemingway, Colette. “ The Technique of Bronze Statuary in Ancient Greece .” (October 2003)
• Hemingway, Colette. “ Women in Classical Greece .” (October 2004)
• Hemingway, Colette. “ Cyprus—Island of Copper .” (October 2004)
• Hemingway, Colette. “ Music in Ancient Greece .” (October 2001)
• Hemingway, Colette. “ Etruscan Art .” (October 2004)
• Hemingway, Colette. “ Prehistoric Cypriot Art and Culture .” (October 2004)
• Hemingway, Colette. “ Sardis .” (October 2004)
• Hemingway, Colette. “ Medicine in Classical Antiquity .” (October 2004)
• Hemingway, Colette. “ Southern Italian Vase Painting .” (October 2004)
• Hemingway, Colette. “ Theater in Ancient Greece .” (October 2004)
• Hemingway, Colette. “ The Kithara in Ancient Greece .” (October 2002)
• Hemingway, Colette. “ Minoan Crete .” (October 2002)

Related Essays

• Pablo Picasso (1881–1973)
• School of Paris
• Anselm Kiefer (born 1945)
• Francisco de Goya (1746–1828) and the Spanish Enlightenment
• Frederic Remington (1861–1909)
• The Holy Roman Empire and the Habsburgs, 1400–1600
• Jean Antoine Houdon (1741–1828)
• Paul Cézanne (1839–1906)
• Pieter Bruegel the Elder (ca. 1525–1569)
• Winslow Homer (1836–1910)

List of Rulers

• List of Rulers of Europe
• Presidents of the United States of America
• France, 1900 A.D.–present
• The United States and Canada, 1900 A.D.–present
• 19th Century A.D.
• 20th Century A.D.
• American Literature / Poetry
• Floral Motif
• Installation Art
• Literature / Poetry
• Modern and Contemporary Art
• Printmaking
• Regionalism
• United States

Artist or Maker

• Bruegel, Pieter, the Elder
• Cézanne, Paul
• Homer, Winslow
• Karsh, Yousuf
• Picasso, Pablo

Online Features

• Connections: “Hemingway” by Seán Hemingway
• MetMedia: The Harvesters

Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Literature › Analysis of Ernest Hemingway’s In Another Country

Analysis of Ernest Hemingway’s In Another Country

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on May 25, 2021

There is something unique about the way Ernest Hemingway begins a short story, and readers will find no better example of this than “In Another Country,” first published in 1927 as part of the collection Men without Women. It seems that the first paragraph of a Hemingway story functions one of three ways: It gives some sense of movement or action (for example, “The rain stopped as Nick turned into the road”); it begins with dialogue or conversation (“ ‘All right,’ said the man. ‘What about it?’ ”); or, as is the case with “In Another Country” and many others, it creates a sense of place and/or mood. Often, these beginnings are poignant and painfully descriptive, by Hemingway standards at least.

“In Another Country” begins thus:

In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it any more. It was cold in the fall in Milan and the dark came very early. Then the electric lights would come on, and it was pleasant along the streets looking in the windows. There was much game hanging outside the shops, and the snow powdered in the fur of the foxes and the wind blew their tails. The deer hung stiff and heavy and empty, and small birds blew in the wind and the wind turned their feathers. It was a cold fall and the wind came down from the mountains. (206)

The story, set in World War I Italy, begins with an echo of Hemingway’s famous novel of that time and place, A Farewell to Arms (1929):

In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.

Ernest Hemingway/Study Breaks Magazine

It is difficult to consider one of these paragraphs without thinking about the other, and even though there are differences in the two (one describes fall, the other summer; one suggests damp and cold, the other aridity and heat), they share the same quality, the poignant creation of place and mood. The sentences have the same surface simplicity, directness, and rhythm that most Hemingway sentences have, but in spite or perhaps because of their directness and simplicity, the reader at once embarks on a journey into a familiar place with the narrator. This familiarity that Hemingway creates between his narrators and readers has often been commented upon, but in “In Another Country,” it serves a different purpose. Readers feel as if they are there fishing the river on the plain with Nick Adams or watching the bullfights in Pamplona with Jake and Brett in other Hemingway works, but in this story the narrative familiarity serves as irony.

“In Another Country” is the story of an American soldier receiving physical therapy for wounds he has received in combat. Far from the front in Milan, the narrator and four other patients make their way through the streets of the city on their way to the hospital to receive treatment. There the patients are exposed to revolutionary treatments using new machines, and they naturally have doubts about the efficacy of the new treatments. The wounded veterans are naturally bitter about their wounds and the treatments they receive. The American later learns that the major is suffering emotionally because his young wife had died recently, and the story ends with the patients’ continuing the cycle of pointless treatment at the hospital, the major staring out the window.

Perhaps the key to the story is the expression given by the narrator as he describes the mental condition of his fellow patients. Speaking of the lieutenant, the most decorated of the group, the narrator points out that “he had lived a very long time with death and was a little detached. We were all a little detached” (207). The idea of detachment naturally fits the story, as readers would expect that the veterans, now far from the front and dealing with their physical and emotional wounds, would feel separated from the rest of society, and readers may also expect Hemingway’s terse style to suggest detachment itself. The American is detached from the Italian soldiers in his group, mainly because he received his decorations only “because I was an American” (208). He is learning Italian and is not very good at it, and that also makes him detached from the group. The doctor and his patients mainly participate in idle chat, instead of meaningful conversation.

However, in light of the mood and sense of place established in the story’s opening lines as well as the relationship between the American and the major, which strengthens toward the end of the story, the idea of detachment becomes somewhat ironic. The American and the major are anything but detached when the major explains that his wife had died recently, and the sense of place established in the opening lines is so detailed and poignant that readers experiencing the narrative familiarity that Hemingway is famous for feel a strong sense of attachment and immediacy.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Benson, Jackson J., ed. New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991. Bloom, Harold, ed. Ernest Hemingway: Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House, 1985. Hemingway, Ernest. “In Another Country.” In The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The Finca Vigía Edition. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1987. Oliver, Charles M. Ernest Hemingway A to Z: The Essential Reference to the Life and Work. New York: Facts On File, 1999. Tyler, Lisa. Student Companion to Ernest Hemingway. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2001. Wagner-Martin, Linda, ed. Ernest Hemingway: Six Decades of Criticism. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1988.

Share this:

Categories: Literature , Short Story

Tags: American Literature , Analysis of Ernest Hemingway's In Another Country , appreciation of Ernest Hemingway's In Another Country , criticism of Ernest Hemingway's In Another Country , Ernest Hemingway , Ernest Hemingway's In Another Country , Ernest Hemingway's In Another Country analysis , Ernest Hemingway's In Another Country essays , Ernest Hemingway's In Another Country guide , Ernest Hemingway's In Another Country notes , Ernest Hemingway's In Another Country plot , Ernest Hemingway's In Another Country structure , Ernest Hemingway's In Another Country summary , Ernest Hemingway's In Another Country themes , guide of Ernest Hemingway's In Another Country , Literary Criticism , plot of Ernest Hemingway's In Another Country , structure of Ernest Hemingway's In Another Country , summary of Ernest Hemingway's In Another Country , themes of Ernest Hemingway's In Another Country

Related Articles

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Prologue Magazine

Hemingway on War and Its Aftermath

Spring 2006, Vol. 38, No. 1

By Thomas Putnam

Researchers come to the Hemingway archives at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library primarily to examine Ernest Hemingway's original manuscripts and his correspondence with family, friends, and fellow writers. But upon entering, it is hard not to notice the artifacts that ornament the Hemingway Room—including a mounted antelope head from a 1933 safari, an authentic lion-skin rug , and original artwork that Hemingway owned.

Though not as conspicuous, one object on display is far more consequential: a piece of shrapnel from the battlefield where Hemingway was wounded during World War I. Had the enemy mortar attack been more successful that fateful night, the world may never have known one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. Conversely, had Hemingway not been injured in that attack, he not may have fallen in love with his Red Cross nurse, a romance that served as the genesis of A Farewell to Arms, one of the century's most read war novels.

Hemingway kept the piece of shrapnel, along with a small handful of other "charms" including a ring set with a bullet fragment, in a small leather change purse. Similarly he held his war experience close to his heart and demonstrated throughout his life a keen interest in war and its effects on those who live through it.

No American writer is more associated with writing about war in the early 20th century than Ernest Hemingway. He experienced it firsthand, wrote dispatches from innumerable frontlines, and used war as a backdrop for many of his most memorable works.

Scholars, including Seán Hemingway, the author's grandson and editor of the recent anthology, Hemingway on War, continue to use documents and photographs in the Hemingway Collection to educate others about Hemingway and his writings on war. The topic of war has also been central to Hemingway forums and conferences organized by the Kennedy Library, including a recent session entitled " Writers on War ." And at the Hemingway centennial, held at the library in 1999, many speakers referenced Hemingway's experience in war and his observations on its aftermath as an abiding element of his literary legacy.

Hemingway and World War I

Hemingway posed for this 1918 portrait in Milan, Italy. (Ernest Hemingway Photograph Collection, Kennedy Library)

View in National Archives Catalog

During the First World War, Ernest Hemingway volunteered to serve in Italy as an ambulance driver with the American Red Cross. In June 1918, while running a mobile canteen dispensing chocolate and cigarettes for soldiers, he was wounded by Austrian mortar fire. "Then there was a flash, as when a blast-furnace door is swung open, and a roar that started white and went red," he recalled in a letter home.

Despite his injuries, Hemingway carried a wounded Italian soldier to safety and was injured again by machine-gun fire. For his bravery, he received the Silver Medal of Valor from the Italian government—one of the first Americans so honored.

Commenting on this experience years later in Men at War, Hemingway wrote: "When you go to war as a boy you have a great illusion of immortality. Other people get killed; not you. . . . Then when you are badly wounded the first time you lose that illusion and you know it can happen to you. After being severely wounded two weeks before my nineteenth birthday I had a bad time until I figured out that nothing could happen to me that had not happened to all men before me. Whatever I had to do men had always done. If they had done it then I could do it too and the best thing was not to worry about it."

Recuperating for six months in a Milan hospital, Hemingway fell in love with Agnes von Kurowsky, an American Red Cross nurse. At war's end, he returned to his home in Oak Park, Illinois, a different man. His experience of travel, combat, and love had broadened his outlook. Yet while his war experience had changed him dramatically, the town he returned to remained very much the same.

Two short stories (written years later) offer insights into his homecoming and his understanding of the dilemmas of the returned war veteran. In "Soldier's Home," Howard Krebs returns home from Europe later than many of his peers. Having missed the victory parades, he is unable to reconnect with those he left behind—especially his mother, who cannot understand how her son has been changed by the war.

"Hemingway's great war work deals with aftermath," stated author Tobias Wolff at the Hemingway centennial celebration. "It deals with what happens to the soul in war and how people deal with that afterward. The problem that Hemingway set for himself in stories like 'Soldier's Home' is the difficulty of telling the truth about what one has been through. He knew about his own difficulty in doing that."

After living for months with his parents, during which time he learned from Agnes that she had fallen in love with another man, he decamped with two friends to his family's Michigan summer cottage, where he had learned to hunt and fish as a young boy. The trip would be the genesis of Big Two-Hearted River —a story that follows one of Hemingway's best known fictional characters, Nick Adams, recently returned from war, on a fishing trip in northern Michigan.

American Red Cross (ARC) volunteer Ernest Hemingway recuperates from wounds at the ARC Hospital, Milan, Italy, Septmber 1918. (Ernest Hemingway Photograph Collection, Kennedy Library)

In the story, Hemingway never actually mentions the war and the injuries Nick has sustained in it—they simply loom below the surface. In this and other stories in his first major collection, In Our Time, Hemingway does more than advance a narrative; he also debuts a new style of writing fiction.

"The way we write about war or even think about war was affected fundamentally by Hemingway," stated Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., another speaker at the Hemingway centennial. In the early 1920s, in reaction to their experience of world war, Hemingway and other modernists lost faith in the central institutions of Western civilization. One of those institutions was literature itself. Nineteenth-century novelists were prone to a florid and elaborate style of writing. Hemingway, using a distinctly American vernacular, created a new style of fiction "in which meaning is established through dialogue, through action, and silences—a fiction in which nothing crucial—or at least very little—is stated explicitly."

"Hemingway was at the crest of a wave of modernists," noted fellow centennial panelist and book critic Gail Caldwell, "that were rebelling against the excesses and hypocrisy of Victorian prose. The First World War is the watershed event that changes world literature as well as how Hemingway responded to it."

Return to Postwar Europe

Hemingway returned to Europe after marrying his first wife, Hadley Richardson. His 1923 passport contains a photograph of him as a young, though serious, man. Initially working as a correspondent for the Toronto Star, while living in Paris he grew into a novelist with the encouragement of such Left Bank notables as Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer described Hemingway's motivation to return to Europe as an expatriate this way. After the war, "Hemingway never really came home again." Yet unlike other expatriate writers who were forced to leave their native lands in the face of political persecution, he left the United States of his own volition fueled, in Gordimer's words, by "the beginnings of a broader human consciousness beyond nationalistic operatives, good or bad. And he made his choice of one of the causes in particular—of justice that was threatened in the cultural Mecca of Europe."

As a correspondent, Hemingway chronicled the outbreak of wars from Macedonia to Madrid and the spread of fascism throughout Europe. Although best known for his fiction, his war reporting was also revolutionary. Hemingway was committed above all else to telling the truth in his writing. To do so, he liked being part of the action, and the power of his writing stemmed, in part, from his commitment to witness combat firsthand.

According to Seán Hemingway, his grandfather's war dispatches "were written in a new style of reporting that told the public about every facet of the war, especially, and most important, its effects on the common man, woman, and child." This narrative style brought to life the stories of individual lives in warfare and earned a wide readership. Before the advent of television and cable news, Hemingway brought world conflicts to life for his North American audience.

In 1922, for example, Hemingway covered the war between Greece and Turkey and witnessed the plight of thousands of Greek refugees. In a sight that has become common to our time, Hemingway documented one of the hidden costs of war—the postwar displacement of whole peoples from their native lands. His vivid dispatches brought this and other stories to the attention of the English-speaking world.

Hemingway often used scenes that he had witnessed as well as his own personal experience to inform his fiction. Explaining his technique 20 years later, he wrote, "the writer's standard of fidelity to the truth should be so high that his invention, out of his experience, should produce a truer account than anything factual can be. For facts can be observed badly; but when a good writer is creating something, he has time and scope to make of it an absolute truth."

In Our Time was published in 1925. It was followed by Hemingway's first major novels, The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms, which chronicle, in reverse order, Hemingway's experiences in war and postwar Europe.

The Sun Also Rises features Jake Barnes, an American World War I veteran whose mysterious combat wounds have caused him to be impotent. Unlike Nick Adams and Howard Krebs, who return stateside after the war, Barnes remains in Europe, joining his compatriots in revels through Paris and Spain. Many regard the novel as Hemingway's portrait of a generation that has lost its way, restlessly seeking meaning in a postwar world. The Hemingway Collection contains almost a dozen drafts of the novel, including four different openings—examples of a burgeoning, hardworking, and exceptionally talented young novelist.

His second novel, A Farewell to Arms, is written as a retrospective of the war experience of Frederic Henry, a wounded American soldier, and his doomed love affair with an English nurse, Catherine Barkley.

Hemingway rewrote the conclusion to A Farewell to Arms many times. Among the gems of the Hemingway Collection are the 44 pages of manuscript containing a score of different endings—which are often used today by visiting English teachers to provide their students with a glimpse of Hemingway the writer at work.

At a recent Kennedy Library forum, author Justin Kaplan noted the number of delicate changes Hemingway made to the novel's last paragraphs. When asked once why he did so, Kaplan recounted, Hemingway responded "I was trying to find the right words."

After reading an early draft, F. Scott Fitzgerald suggested Hemingway end the book with one of its most memorable passages: "The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure that it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry." Scrawled at the bottom of Fitzgerald's 10-page letter in Hemingway's hand is his three-word reaction—"Kiss my ass"—leaving no doubt of his dismissal of Fitzgerald's suggestions.

Though World War I is more backdrop than cause to this tragedy—Catherine's death in the end is brought about through childbirth not warfare—the novel contains, as seen in the following passage, a stark critique of war and those who laud it:

I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice. . . . We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of the places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.

Much of the literature decrying World War I came from British poets, many of whom perished in battle. In A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway added his voice to the chorus, expanding the message to an American audience whose citizenry had not suffered nearly the level of war losses as its European allies. To appreciate the stance that Hemingway took, according to Gail Caldwell, one has to understand how revolutionary it was in light of the Victorian understanding of patriotism and courage. "If you look at Hemingway's prose and the writing he did about war, it was as radical in its time as anything we have seen since."

Commenting on the days and months he spent writing the novel, Hemingway wrote his editor, Max Perkins, that during this time much had occurred in his own life, including the birth of his second son, Patrick, by Caesarian section and the suicide of his father.

"I remember all these things happening and all the places we lived in and the fine times and the bad times we had in that year," Hemingway wrote in a 1948 introduction to A Farewell to Arms. "But much more vividly I remember living in the book and making up what happened in it every day. Making the country and the people and the things that happened I was happier than I had ever been. . . . The fact that the book was a tragic one did not make me unhappy since I believed that life is tragedy and knew it could only have one end. But finding you were able to make something up; to create truly enough so that it made you happy to read it; and to do this every day you worked was something that gave a greater pleasure than any I had ever known. Beside it nothing else mattered."

The Spanish Civil War

Hemingway had an enduring love affair with Spain and the Spanish people. He had seen his first bullfight in the early 1920s, and his experience of the festivals in Pamplona informed his writing of The Sun Also Rises. The Hemingway Collection contains the author's personal collection of bullfighting material, including ticket stubs, programs, and his research material for his 1931 treatise on bullfighting, Death in the Afternoon. So it is not surprising that as fascism spread throughout Europe, Hemingway took special interest when civil war broke out in Spain.

Hemingway poses in the Plaza de Toros de la Fuente del Berro in Madrid, Spain, in summer 1923. (Ernest Hemingway Photograph Collection, Kennedy Library)

Hemingway first encountered fascism in the 1920s when he interviewed Benito Mussolini, a man he described as "the biggest bluff in Europe." Although others initially credited Mussolini for bringing order to Italy, Hemingway had seen him for the brutal dictator he was to become. In fact, Hemingway dated his own antifascism to 1924 and the murder of Giacoma Matteotti, an Italian Socialist who was killed by Mussolini's Fasciti after speaking out against him.

In Spain, Francisco Franco, with support from Germany and Italy, used his Nationalist forces to spearhead a revolt against the government and those loyal to the Republic. When civil war broke out, Hemingway returned to Spain as a correspondent for the North American Newspaper Alliance, serving, at times, with fellow journalist Martha Gellhorn, who would become his third wife.

While in Spain, Hemingway collaborated with famed war photographer Robert Capa. Capa's photographs of Hemingway during this period are now part of the Hemingway Collection's extensive audiovisual archives of more than 10,000 photographs.

Hemingway's coverage of the war has been criticized for being slanted against Franco and the Nationalists. In a 1951 letter to Carlos Baker, Hemingway explained it this way. "There were at least five parties in the Spanish Civil War on the Republic side. I tried to understand and evaluate all five (very difficult) and belonged to none. . . . I had no party but a deep interest in and love for the Republic. . . . In Spain I had, and have, many friends on the other side. I tried to write truly about them, too. Politically, I was always on the side of the Republic from the day it was declared and for a long time before."

"It is the duty of a war correspondent to present both sides in his writing," contends Seán Hemingway, and in this instance, Hemingway "failed to do so siding as he did so strongly with the Republic against the Nationalists." Yet his dispatches provide a vivid accuracy of how the war was fought—and his experience would later inform his writing of For Whom the Bell Tolls. Despite his sympathies for the Loyalist cause, he is credited for documenting in this novel the horrors that occurred on both sides of that struggle.

The novel's protagonist, Robert Jordan, an American teacher turned demolitions expert, joins an anti-fascist Spanish guerrilla brigade with orders from a resident Russian general to blow up a bridge.

For author Gordimer, what is remarkable about the novel (which she describes as a cult book for her generation) is that Jordan takes up arms in another country's civil war for personal, not ideological, reasons. In the novel, Hemingway suggests that Jordan has no politics. Instead, his dedication to the Republic is fueled, in Gordimer's words, by a "kind of conservative individualism that collides in self-satisfaction with the claims of the wider concern for humanity." Jordan dedicates himself to a cause and is willing to risk his own life for it.

The bridge gets destroyed, his compatriots flee, and Jordan is left behind, injured, to face certain death at the hands of the approaching fascist troops. It is perhaps because of his commitment to action that Jordan became such a cult figure for his times. In his own words from the novel: "Today is only one day in all the days that will ever be. But what will happen in all the other days that ever come can depend on what you do today. It's been that way all this year. It's been that way so many times. All of war is that way."

World War II and Its Aftermath

In 1942 Hemingway agreed to edit Men at War, an anthology of the best war stories of all time. With the United States now at war, Hemingway remarked in the introduction: "The Germans are not successful because they are supermen. They are simply practical professionals in war who have abandoned all the old theories . . . and who have developed the best practical use of weapons and tactics. . . . It is at that point that we can take over if no dead hand of last-war thinking lies on the high command."

Not one to sit about or practice the "dead hand of last-war thinking," Hemingway, living in Cuba when the war broke out, took it upon himself to patrol the Caribbean for German U-boats. The Hemingway Collection contains many entries in the day log of his boat Pilar and his typewritten reports to local military commanders indicating how carefully he recorded his sightings and passed them on to American intelligence officials.

In 1944 he returned to Europe to witness key moments in World War II, including the D-day landings. He was 44 at the time and, comparing his photograph on his Certificate of Identity of Noncombatant to the portrait of the young 19-year-old who volunteered in World War I, one notices how distinguished the internationally renowned author had become in those 25 years.

Hemingway accompanied American troops as they stormed to shore on Omaha Beach—though as a civilian correspondent he was not allowed to land himself. Weeks later he returned to Normandy, attaching himself to the 22nd Regiment commanded by Col. Charles "Buck" Lanham as it drove toward Paris (whose liberation he would later witness and write about). Before doing so, Hemingway led a controversial effort to gather military intelligence in the village of Rambouillet and, with military authorization, took up arms himself with his small band of irregulars.

According to World War II historian Paul Fussell, "Hemingway got into considerable trouble playing infantry captain to a group of Resistance people that he gathered because a correspondent is not supposed to lead troops, even if he does it well."

On June 23, 1951, Hemingway wrote to C. L. Sulzberger of the New York Times with his own explanation: "Certain allegations of fighting and commanding irregular troops were made but I was cleared of these by the Inspector General of the Third Army. . . . For your information, I had an assignment to write only one article a month for Colliers and I wished to make myself useful between those monthly pieces. I had a certain amount of knowledge about guerilla warfare and irregular tactics as well as a grounding in more formal war and I was willing and happy to work for or be of use to anybody who would give me anything to do within my capabilities."

In 1944 Hemingway returned to Europe as a correspondent, traveling with the 22nd Regiment to Paris. At the Hôtel de la Mère Poularde, Mont-St.-Michel, in August 1944 are pictured (left to right) Bill Walton, Mme. Chevalier, Ernest Hemingway, an unidentified Signal Corps photographer, M. Chevalier, and Robert Capa. (Ernest Hemingway Photograph Collection, Kennedy Library)

Hemingway remained in Europe for 10 months traveling with the Allied infantry into the Hürtgenwald forest as they "cracked" the Siegfried Line. At war's end, Hemingway was back in Cuba. In light of American use of the atomic bomb, he reminded his fellow countrymen that "For the moment we are the strongest power in the world. It is important that we do not become the most hated." To avoid such a fate, he said, "we need to study and understand certain basic problems of our world as they were before Hiroshima to be able to continue, intelligently, to discover how some of them have changed and how they can be settled justly now that a new weapon has become the property of the world. We must study them more carefully than ever now and remember that no weapon has ever settled a moral problem. It can impose a solution but it cannot guarantee it to be a just one."

In a small ceremony in June 1947 at the U.S. embassy in Cuba, Hemingway was awarded a Bronze Star for his service as a war correspondent for having circulated "freely under fire in combat areas in order to obtain an accurate picture of conditions. Through his talent of expression, Mr. Hemingway enabled readers to obtain a vivid picture of the difficulties and triumphs of the front-line soldier and his organization in combat."

Hemingway wrote one novel with World War II as its backdrop. Across the River and Into the Trees is set in Venice at the close of the war and tells the story of an aging American colonel who falls in love with a young Italian countess. The book was not as well received as his earlier novels—not meeting the expectation that it might capture the essence of World War II the way A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls had done for World War I and the Spanish Civil War.

Nor did his short stories published in this period capture the public's imagination concerning the most recent world war. One story that has garnered attention in recent anthologies, Black Ass at the Cross Roads, was never published in Hemingway's lifetime (the original manuscript remaining instead as part of the papers of the Hemingway Collection). According to Fussell, this "masterpiece," which tells the story of an ambush of German soldiers by an American infantryman who suffers great remorse for what he has done, "is so realistic and so inexplicable in any other way than to believe that Hemingway was there and that perhaps it was never published because it was too incriminating."

In 1952 Hemingway redeemed his reputation as one of the century's great writers with the publication of The Old Man and the Sea , which also helped earn him the 1954 Nobel Prize for Literature. When Fidel Castro swept into power in 1959, Ernest and Mary Hemingway left their home in Cuba, moving to the outskirts of Ketchum, Idaho. During the next few years, Hemingway experienced serious health problems and committed suicide on July 2, 1961.

An Enduring Legacy

It is often difficult to separate the public Hemingway from his art—and his literary achievements have, at times, been overshadowed by his mythic persona. Much of that myth stems from Hemingway's own hand. For example, in a public flap with writer William Faulkner after Faulkner suggested that Hemingway had not been a courageous writer, Hemingway asked Gen. "Buck" Lanham to respond on his behalf. Lanham did so, outlining Hemingway's feats at his side during World War II and concluded that he was "without exception the most courageous man I have ever known, both in war and peace. He has physical courage, and he has that far rarer commodity, moral courage."

Gordimer suggests that in assessing the legacy of Hemingway and his insights on war that we leave such arguments alone. "I'm not concerned with what Ernest Hemingway did or did not do in his own body, his own person, out of his own courage in wars. . . . Let us leave his life alone. It belongs to him as he lived it. Let us read his books. They are his particular illumination of what our existence has been, his gift to us that belongs to us all."

Professor Gates concluded the centennial celebration similarly—noting that Hemingway was "one of the finest prose stylists in English. He captured in stunning stories and novels the uncomfortable realities of his age and forced into public consciousness a realization of the brutalities of war and their lingering psychological affects. His stories of Nick Adams depict the adolescent agonies of a generation. His best novels record for all time the emotional turmoil of modern warfare and modern life. It is the integrity of his craft, a richness beyond legend, that will forever endure."

Hemingway's legacy is inexorably tied to his books, stories, and dispatches. Those who visit the Hemingway Collection—be they scholars conducting research or students experiencing Hemingway for the first time—are most drawn to the letters and manuscripts written in the author's own hand. To see each word, deletion, and edit is to witness a master craftsman at work.

Hemingway dedicated himself to writing "truly" on all topics including and especially the subject of war and its effect on his times. He dedicated the anthology Men at War to his three sons so that they might have a book "that will contain the truth about war as near we can come by it. . . . It will not replace experience. But it can prepare and supplement experience. It can serve as a corrective after experience." The same can be said of Hemingway's own work. It cannot replicate the experience of those who lived through the war-torn years of the first half of the 20th century, but it offers the truth about those wars as near we can come by it.

Note on Sources

Quotations from Nadine Gordimer, Tobias Wolff, Gail Caldwell, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., were taken from remarks given at the Hemingway centennial celebration at the John F. Kennedy Library on April 10–11, 1999. Audiotapes of those proceedings and other Hemingway forums are available at the Kennedy Library. Inquiries can be made directly to the author.

The quotations from Paul Fussell are taken from remarks at the forum "Writers on War" at the John F. Kennedy Library on March 21, 2004.

The quotation from Justin Kaplan is taken from remarks given at a forum, "Dear Papa; Dear Hotch," at the Kennedy Library on November 28, 2005.

Quotations from Seán Hemingway come from his introduction to Hemingway on War (New York: Scribner, 2003). The quotation from Mussolini, Europe's Prize Bluffer is also from that anthology.

Correspondence such as the letter from F. Scott Fitzgerald and the letter to C. L. Sulzberger are from the Hemingway Collection.

The logbook to the Pilar, Hemingway's fishing boat, and Hemingway's memorandums on his U-boat sightings to U.S. military intelligence officials are from the Hemingway Collection.

Letters between Hemingway and Carlos Baker are from the Hemingway Collection. Background material and references also come from Baker's biographies, Hemingway: Writer as Artist (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1952) and Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (New York: Scribner, 1969).

References to Hemingway's published work include: A Farewell to Arms (New York, Scribner, 1929); For Whom the Bell Tolls (New York: Scribner, 1940); In Our Time (New York: Scribner, 1925 ); The Sun Also Rises (New York: Scribner, 1926); introduction, Illustrated Edition of A Farewell to Arms (New York: Scribner, 1948); introduction, Men at War (New York: Crown Publishers, 1942); foreword, Treasury for the Free World, edited by Ben Raeburn (New York: Arco, 1946).

The Hemingway Collection as a whole was discussed in Megan Floyd Desnoyers, "Ernest Hemingway: A Storyteller's Legacy," Prologue: Quarterly of the National Archives 24 (Winter 1992): 334–350.

Thomas Putnam is the deputy director of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.

A Summary and Analysis of Ernest Hemingway’s ‘A Day’s Wait’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘A Day’s Wait’ is one of Ernest Hemingway’s shortest short stories, running to just a few pages. It was published in 1927 in his collection The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories . In just a few pages, ‘A Day’s Wait’ covers a number of key features of Hemingway’s work as a whole, and so despite not being one of his best-known stories, it’s oddly representative of his oeuvre as a whole.

You can read ‘A Day’s Wait’ here before proceeding to our summary and analysis below.

‘A Day’s Wait’: plot summary

The story is narrated by an unnamed father of a nine-year-old boy named Schatz. The boy falls ill with influenza. He tells his father he has a headache and when his father feels the boy’s forehead, it’s clear he has a fever.

The doctor comes to examine the boy and tells him that his temperature is 102 degrees. However, the boy mistakenly thinks the doctor means 102 degrees Celsius rather than 102 Fahrenheit. Because he believes his temperature is much higher than it is, Schatz becomes convinced he is going to die from the illness, as he had been told in school that any temperature over 44 degrees would mean certain death.

The story’s title, ‘A Day’s Wait’, refers to the boy’s day spent waiting to die, as he believes he will. However, the father, who narrates the story, doesn’t realise that boy believes he is approaching imminent death, and simply ascribes his son’s strange behaviour (such as staring straight ahead) to the illness.

The father tries to read from Howard Pyle’s Book of Pirates to keep his son entertained in his sickbed, but Schatz doesn’t seem to be listening. Then the father goes out with his dog for a walk, and shoots quail.

When the boy’s father returns and talks to his son, he realises his son’s mistake and explains it to him – using the analogy of confusing kilometres with miles to explain the difference between Celsius and Fahrenheit temperatures – and the son feels relieved and begins his recovery.

‘A Day’s Wait’: analysis

In a number of ways, ‘A Day’s Wait’ typifies Ernest Hemingway’s style and subject matter: the first-person narration of the father character is offered to us in short, simple, clipped sentences and plain language, and a number of recurring Hemingway themes – the macho pursuits represented by the father’s hunting trip and the pirate book – are present.

The first-person narrative style also helps to sow the seeds of the plot twist. Because the father only finds out about his son’s mistake near the end of the story, we remain as much in the dark about the boy’s behaviour as the father is, until it is explained at the end with the reference to the mix-up over thermometer scales.

‘A Day’s Wait’ functions almost like a miniature mystery story: why is the boy responding to an ordinary and largely unthreatening bout of influenza in such a strange way? Is it a result of the effects of fever?

It is worth remembering that Hemingway himself had been a young man when the so-called Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-20 killed millions of people around the world, including many young and healthy people. Although the case of flu which Schatz suffers from is much less severe and clearly non-lethal, one wonders whether the recent memory of the Spanish flu lurks somewhere behind ‘A Day’s Wait’.

In ‘A Natural History of the Dead’, Hemingway wrote of the horrors of seeing someone die from Spanish influenza, as he did at the end of the First World War after he had been shadowing Red Cross nurses in Europe. He mentions the sufferer drowning in mucus and becoming a child again.

Perhaps surprisingly given his well-known ‘macho’ persona, Hemingway was all too aware of the horrors of influenza in his own lifetime and it’s likely that his memory of the Spanish flu pandemic stuck with him when he wrote ‘A Day’s Wait’ some time later.

Although Schatz’s fear of dying is unfounded in his case, and the result of a naïve misreading of his temperature, we might analyse his response as symbolic (or symptomatic, we might say) of a whole generation’s increased horror of the potential deadliness of influenza.

In this connection, the fact that the boy’s odd response to his illness strikes many readers and critics as improbable (wouldn’t the boy say something, or scream, or cry, rather than simply wait placidly to die?) lends credence to the idea that ‘A Day’s Wait’ is operating on some symbolic level.

And, of course, just like his father, Schatz the nine-year-old embodies the curious combination of outward machismo and inward sensitivity which we associate with so many Hemingway characters. The boy is sensitive enough to believe that his end has come, and although he is in error, his erroneous position is founded on his school learning and (partial) knowledge of temperature scales.

But he is also outwardly stoic enough to want to meet his (perceived) death with equanimity. In many ways, although it is his father who goes hunting, it is the son who most clearly represents the ‘Hemingway character’ in ‘A Day’s Wait’.

Discover more from Interesting Literature

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.

Type your email…

4 thoughts on “A Summary and Analysis of Ernest Hemingway’s ‘A Day’s Wait’”

Thanks for sharing the summary. Nicely written.

I read it three days ago 😃. And here you give me analysis. Thank you .

Thanks for your analysis. One thing though, that you may be missing. The boy’s name is probably not Schatz. Schatz is the German word for “dear, darling or precious”, so basically an endearment which Hemingway would have known from his time in Europe, including Germany and Switzerland.

I’d never known of this particular story until reading this.

A year or so ago, as our current pandemic became recognized, I figured there would be ample literary works that would at least touch on the 1919 flu pandemic written during “The Previous 20s.” I was looking specifically for poetry, but. even when I broadened my search out to literature in general there was nearly nothing. Yes, there was The Magic Mountain” and then what else?

You’ve extended that “what else?” Thanks.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading

Ernest Hemingway

Nobel Prize winner Ernest Hemingway is seen as one of the great American 20th century novelists, and is known for works like 'A Farewell to Arms' and 'The Old Man and the Sea.'

(1899-1961)

Who Was Ernest Hemingway?

Ernest Hemingway served in World War I and worked in journalism before publishing his story collection In Our Time . He was renowned for novels like The Sun Also Rises , A Farewell to Arms , For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Old Man and the Sea , which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953. In 1954, Hemingway won the Nobel Prize. He committed suicide on July 2, 1961, in Ketchum, Idaho.

Early Life and Career

Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in Cicero (now in Oak Park), Illinois. Clarence and Grace Hemingway raised their son in this conservative suburb of Chicago, but the family also spent a great deal of time in northern Michigan, where they had a cabin. It was there that the future sportsman learned to hunt, fish and appreciate the outdoors.

In high school, Hemingway worked on his school newspaper, Trapeze and Tabula , writing primarily about sports. Immediately after graduation, the budding journalist went to work for the Kansas City Star , gaining experience that would later influence his distinctively stripped-down prose style.

He once said, "On the Star you were forced to learn to write a simple declarative sentence. This is useful to anyone. Newspaper work will not harm a young writer and could help him if he gets out of it in time."

Military Experience

In 1918, Hemingway went overseas to serve in World War I as an ambulance driver in the Italian Army. For his service, he was awarded the Italian Silver Medal of Bravery, but soon sustained injuries that landed him in a hospital in Milan.

There he met a nurse named Agnes von Kurowsky, who soon accepted his proposal of marriage, but later left him for another man. This devastated the young writer but provided fodder for his works "A Very Short Story" and, more famously, A Farewell to Arms .

Still nursing his injury and recovering from the brutalities of war at the young age of 20, he returned to the United States and spent time in northern Michigan before taking a job at the Toronto Star .

It was in Chicago that Hemingway met Hadley Richardson, the woman who would become his first wife. The couple married and quickly moved to Paris, where Hemingway worked as a foreign correspondent for the Star .

Life in Europe

In 1925, the couple, joining a group of British and American expatriates, took a trip to the festival that would later provide the basis of Hemingway's first novel, The Sun Also Rises . The novel is widely considered Hemingway's greatest work, artfully examining the postwar disillusionment of his generation.

Soon after the publication of The Sun Also Rises , Hemingway and Hadley divorced, due in part to his affair with a woman named Pauline Pfeiffer, who would become Hemingway's second wife shortly after his divorce from Hadley was finalized. The author continued to work on his book of short stories, Men Without Women.

Critical Acclaim

Soon, Pauline became pregnant and the couple decided to move back to America. After the birth of their son Patrick Hemingway in 1928, they settled in Key West, Florida, but summered in Wyoming. During this time, Hemingway finished his celebrated World War I novel A Farewell to Arms , securing his lasting place in the literary canon.

When he wasn't writing, Hemingway spent much of the 1930s chasing adventure: big-game hunting in Africa, bullfighting in Spain and deep-sea fishing in Florida. While reporting on the Spanish Civil War in 1937, Hemingway met a fellow war correspondent named Martha Gellhorn (soon to become wife number three) and gathered material for his next novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls , which would eventually be nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

Almost predictably, his marriage to Pfeiffer deteriorated and the couple divorced. Gellhorn and Hemingway married soon after and purchased a farm near Havana, Cuba, which would serve as their winter residence.

When the United States entered World War II in 1941, Hemingway served as a correspondent and was present at several of the war's key moments, including the D-Day landing. Toward the end of the war, Hemingway met another war correspondent, Mary Welsh, whom he would later marry after divorcing Gellhorn.

In 1951, Hemingway wrote The Old Man and the Sea , which would become perhaps his most famous book, finally winning him the Pulitzer Prize he had long been denied.

Personal Struggles and Suicide

The author continued his forays into Africa and sustained several injuries during his adventures, even surviving multiple plane crashes.

In 1954, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Even at this peak of his literary career, though, the burly Hemingway's body and mind were beginning to betray him. Recovering from various old injuries in Cuba, Hemingway suffered from depression and was treated for numerous conditions such as high blood pressure and liver disease.

He wrote A Moveable Feast , a memoir of his years in Paris, and retired permanently to Idaho. There he continued to battle with deteriorating mental and physical health.

Early on the morning of July 2, 1961, Hemingway committed suicide in his Ketchum home.

Hemingway left behind an impressive body of work and an iconic style that still influences writers today. His personality and constant pursuit of adventure loomed almost as large as his creative talent.

When asked by George Plimpton about the function of his art, Hemingway proved once again to be a master of the "one true sentence": "From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality."

In August 2018, a 62-year-old short story by Hemingway, "A Room on the Garden Side," was published for the first time in The Strand Magazine . Set in Paris shortly after the liberation of the city from Nazi forces in 1944, the story was one of five composed by the writer in 1956 about his World War II experiences. It became the second story from the series to earn posthumous publication, following "Black Ass at the Crossroads."

QUICK FACTS

• Name: Ernest Hemingway
• Birth Year: 1899
• Birth date: July 21, 1899
• Birth State: Illinois
• Birth City: Cicero (now in Oak Park)
• Birth Country: United States
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: Nobel Prize winner Ernest Hemingway is seen as one of the great American 20th century novelists, and is known for works like 'A Farewell to Arms' and 'The Old Man and the Sea.'
• Writing and Publishing
• Astrological Sign: Cancer
• Oak Park and River Forest High School
• Death Year: 1961
• Death date: July 2, 1961
• Death State: Idaho
• Death City: Ketchum
• Death Country: United States

We strive for accuracy and fairness.If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us !

CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: Ernest Hemingway Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
• Url: https://www.biography.com/writer/ernest-hemingway
• Access Date:
• Publisher: A&E Television Networks
• Last Updated: May 7, 2021
• Original Published Date: April 3, 2014
• Never confuse movement with action.
• There is no friend as loyal as a book.
• Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
• Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. It will teach you to keep your mouth shut.
• An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with fools.
• The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.
• Write drunk, edit sober.
• All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.
• All thinking men are atheists.
• It's good to have an end to journey to; but in the end it's the journey that matters.
• Never that think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.

Watch Next .css-16toot1:after{background-color:#262626;color:#fff;margin-left:1.8rem;margin-top:1.25rem;width:1.5rem;height:0.063rem;content:'';display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;}

Nobel Prize Winners

Chien-Shiung Wu

The Solar Eclipse That Made Albert Einstein a Star

14 Hispanic Women Who Have Made History

Marie Curie

Martin Luther King Jr.

Henry Kissinger

Malala Yousafzai

Jimmy Carter

10 Famous Poets Whose Enduring Works We Still Read

22 Famous Scientists You Should Know

Wole Soyinka

Ernest Hemingway Collection

The Ernest Hemingway Personal Papers includes textual and audiovisual material donated to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library by Mary Welsh Hemingway (Ernest Hemingway's widow) and additional donors over several decades. The collection spans Hemingway's entire career, and contains ninety percent of known Hemingway manuscript materials, making the Library the world's principal center for research on the life and work of this author.

The archival holdings contain some content and descriptions that may be harmful or difficult to view. Learn more.

Researchers and enthusiasts are welcome to explore the Library’s Hemingway-related collections. To learn more or to make an appointment to work with the collections, contact a reference archivist at [email protected] .

Ernest Hemingway Textual Materials

Learn about the Ernest Hemingway Personal Papers and related collections in the Library’s textual archives.

Ernest Hemingway Audiovisual Materials

Explore the Ernest Hemingway Photographs collection, including digitized scrapbooks, and additional materials that document the life and work of the author and his family, friends, and contemporaries.

Collection Highlights

Permission to publish.

Learn about requesting permission to publish portions of Ernest Hemingway’s writings.

Hemingway Media Galleries

Hemingway news, hemingway events, friends of the ernest hemingway collection.

The Friends of the Ernest Hemingway Collection was founded in 1990 by Patrick Hemingway, son of the Nobel Prize-winning author, and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis to provide financial support and resources to preserve and make accessible the Ernest Hemingway Collection at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.

Biography of Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in suburban Oak Park, IL, to Dr. Clarence and Grace Hemingway. Ernest was the second of six children to be raised in the quiet suburban town. His father was a physician, and both parents were devout Christians. Hemingway's childhood pursuits fostered the interests that would blossom into literary achievements.

Although Grace hoped her musical interests would influence her son, young Hemingway preferred to accompany his father on hunting and fishing trips. This love of outdoor adventure would be reflected later in many of Hemingway's stories, particularly those featuring protagonist Nick Adams.

Hemingway also had an aptitude for physical challenge that engaged him throughout high school, where he both played football and boxed. Because of permanent eye damage contracted from numerous boxing matches, Hemingway was repeatedly rejected from service in World War I. Boxing provided more material for Hemingway's stories, as well as a habit of likening his literary feats to boxing victories.

Hemingway also edited his high school newspaper and reported for the Kansas City Star , adding a year to his age after graduating from high school in 1917.

After this short stint, Hemingway finally was able to participate in World War I as an ambulance driver for the American Red Cross. He was wounded on July 8, 1918, on the Italian front near Fossalta di Piave. During his convalescence in Milan, he had an affair with a nurse, Agnes von Kurowsky. Hemingway received two decorations from the Italian government, and he joined the Italian infantry. Fighting on the Italian front inspired the plot of A Farewell to Arms in 1929. Indeed, war itself is a major theme in Hemingway's works. Hemingway would witness firsthand the cruelty and stoicism required of the soldiers he would portray in his writing when covering the Greco-Turkish War in 1920 for the Toronto Star . In 1937, he was a war correspondent in Spain, and the events of the Spanish Civil War inspired For Whom the Bell Tolls .

Upon returning briefly to the United States after the First World War, Hemingway worked for the Toronto Star and lived for a short time in Chicago. There, he met Sherwood Anderson and married Hadley Richardson in 1921. On Anderson's advice, the couple moved to Paris, where he served as foreign correspondent for the Star . As Hemingway covered events on all of Europe, the young reporter interviewed important leaders such as Lloyd George, Clemenceau, and Mussolini.

The Hemingways lived in Paris from 1921-1926. This time of stylistic development for Hemingway reached its zenith in 1923 with the publication of Three Stories and Ten Poems by Robert McAlmon in Paris and the birth of his son John. This time in Paris also inspired the novel A Moveable Feast , published posthumously in 1964.

During this period following the birth of his first child, Hemingway began to acquire a series of nicknames that eventually culminated in the well-known moniker “Papa.” Hadley and John referred to him as “Ernestoic,” “Tatie,” and “Tiny,” and he was also known as “Ernie,” “Hem,” “Wemedge,” and “Hemmy” at various points in his life. “Papa” came about for a number of reasons, including, according to official biographer Carlos Baker, Hemingway’s desire to be respected, admired, and obeyed. In addition, “Papa” dovetailed with Hemingway’s reputation as a rough-and-tumble outdoorsman and adventurer.

In January 1923, Hemingway began writing sketches that would appear in In Our Time , which was published in 1924. In August of 1923 he and Hadley returned to Toronto where he worked once again for the Star . At this point, he produced no writing that was not committed to publication, and in the coming months, his job kept him from starting anything new. However, this time off from writing gave him renewed energy upon his return to Paris in January of 1924.

During his time in Toronto he read Joyce's Dubliners , which forever changed his writing career. By August of 1924, he had the majority of In Our Time written. Although there was a period when his publisher Horace Liverwright wanted to change much of the collection, Hemingway stood firm and refused to change even one word of the book.

In Paris, Hemingway used Sherwood Anderson's letter of introduction to meet Gertrude Stein and enter the world of expatriate authors and artists who inhabited her intellectual circle. The famous description of this "lost generation" was born of an employee's remark to Hemingway, and it became immortalized as the epigraph for his first major novel, The Sun Also Rises .

This "lost generation" both characterized the postwar generation and the literary movement it produced. In the 1920s, writers such as Anderson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and Gertrude Stein decried the false ideals of patriotism that led young people to war, only to the benefit of materialistic elders. These writers held that the only truth was reality, and thus life could be nothing but hardship. This tenet strongly influenced Hemingway.

The late 1920s were a time of many publications for Hemingway. In 1926, The Torrents of Spring and The Sun Also Rises were published by Charles Scribner's Sons.

In 1927 Hemingway published a short story collection, Men Without Women . In the same year he divorced Hadley Richardson and married Pauline Pfieffer, a writer for Vogue . In 1928, they moved to Key West, where sons Patrick and Gregory were born in 1929 and 1932. 1928 was a year of both success and sorrow for Hemingway. In this year, A Farewell to Arms was published, and his father committed suicide. Clarence Hemingway had been suffering from hypertension and diabetes. This painful experience is reflected in the pondering of Robert Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls .

In addition to personal experiences with war and death, Hemingway's extensive travel in pursuit of hunting and other sports provided a great deal of material for his novels. Bullfighting inspired Death in the Afternoon , published in 1932. In 1934, Hemingway went on safari in Africa, which gave him new themes and scenes on which to base The Snows of Kilamanjaro and The Green Hills of Africa , published in 1935.

In 1937 he traveled to Spain as a war correspondent, and he published To Have and Have Not . After his divorce from Pauline in 1940, Hemingway married Martha Gelhorn, a writer. They toured China before settling in Cuba at Finca Vigia (Look-out Farm). For Whom the Bell Tolls was published in the same year.

During World War II, Hemingway volunteered his fishing boat and served with the U.S. Navy as a submarine spotter in the Caribbean. In 1944, he traveled through Europe with the Allies as a war correspondent and participated in the liberation of Paris. Hemingway divorced again in 1945 and then married Mary Welsh, a correspondent for Time magazine, in 1946. They lived in Venice before returning to Cuba.

In 1950 he published Across the River and Into the Trees , though it was not received with the usual critical acclaim. In 1952, however, Hemingway proved the comment "Papa is finished" wrong, with The Old Man and the Sea winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1953. In 1954, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

In 1960, the now aged Hemingway moved to Ketchum, Idaho, where he was hospitalized for uncontrolled high blood pressure, liver disease, diabetes, and depression.

On July 2, 1961, he died of self-inflicted gunshot wounds. He was buried in Ketchum. "Papa" was both a legendary celebrity and a sensitive writer, and his influence, as well as some unseen writings, survived his passing. In 1964, A Moveable Feast was published; in 1969, The Fifth Column and Four Stories of the Spanish Civil War ; in 1970, Islands in the Stream ; in 1972, The Nick Adams Stories ; in 1985, The Dangerous Summer ; and in 1986, The Garden of Eden .

Hemingway's own life and character are as fascinating as in any of his stories. On one level, Papa was a legendary adventurer who enjoyed his flamboyant lifestyle and celebrity status. However, deep inside lived a disciplined author who worked tirelessly in pursuit of literary perfection. His success in both living and writing is reflected in the fact that Hemingway is a hero to intellectuals and rebels alike; the passions of the man are equaled only by those in his writing.

Study Guides on Works by Ernest Hemingway

A farewell to arms ernest hemingway.

World War I began in 1914 and ended on Nov. 11, 1918. Fought primarily between the Triple Alliance powers of Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Triple Entente countries of England, France, Russia, Italy, and the U.S. (Italy defected...

• Study Guide
• Lesson Plan

For Whom the Bell Tolls Ernest Hemingway

For Whom the Bell Tolls was inspired by Hemingway's experiences as a foreign correspondent, first in Paris and then in Spain itself, during the Spanish Civil War. Hemingway visited Spain in 1931, just after the monarchy of Alfonso XIII had been...

The Garden of Eden Ernest Hemingway

The Garden of Eden was the first big project pursued by Ernest Hemingway after a drought that lasted through the early '40s. It's believed that his personal life frustrated his work. He had a new wife, he had developing health issues surrounding...

In Our Time Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway wrote In Our Time in 1925, and its critical acclaim established him as a literary force. Critics currently argue over whether it should be considered a novel or merely a compilation of short stories and vignettes. In fact it has...

A Moveable Feast Ernest Hemingway

A Moveable Feast , written by Ernest Hemingway, was published in 1964. This volume was published by his wife, the fourth one, after his death; the book is a memoir about his life in Paris and other places, and Hemingway's relationships between...

The Old Man and the Sea Ernest Hemingway

The Old Man and the Sea was published 1952 after the bleakest ten years in Hemingway's literary career. His last major work, Across the River and into the Trees , was condemned as unintentional self-parody, and people began to think that Hemingway...

Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway Ernest Hemingway

Many of Hemingway’s short stories appeared in various magazines before being anthologized in his short story collections. The first of these collections, and his first major published work, was Three Stories and Ten Poems (1923); this collection...

The Sun Also Rises Ernest Hemingway

The Sun Also Rises will maintain a place in history not only for its literary merit, but also for its documentation of what writer Gertrude Stein called the "Lost Generation." After WWI, many young Americans left their native country, bitter over...

Poems & Poets

Ernest M. Hemingway

"The writer's job is to tell the truth," Ernest Hemingway once said. When he was having difficulty writing he reminded himself of this, as he explained in his memoirs, A Moveable Feast. "I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, 'Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.' So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say." Hemingway's personal and artistic quests for truth were directly related. As Earl Rovit noted: "More often than not, Hemingway's fictions seem rooted in his journeys into himself much more clearly and obsessively than is usually the case with major fiction writers.... His writing was his way of approaching his identity—of discovering himself in the projected metaphors of his experience. He believed that if he could see himself clear and whole, his vision might be useful to others who also lived in this world." The public's acquaintance with the personal life of Hemingway was perhaps greater than with any other modern novelist. He was well known as a sportsman and bon vivant and his escapades were covered in such popular magazines as Life and Esquire. Hemingway became a legendary figure, wrote John W. Aldridge, "a kind of twentieth-century Lord Byron; and like Byron, he had learned to play himself, his own best hero, with superb conviction. He was Hemingway of the rugged outdoor grin and the hairy chest posing beside a marlin he had just landed or a lion he had just shot; he was Tarzan Hemingway, crouching in the African bush with elephant gun at ready, Bwana Hemingway commanding his native bearers in terse Swahili; he was War Correspondent Hemingway writing a play in the Hotel Florida in Madrid while thirty Fascist shells crashed through the roof; later on he was Task Force Hemingway swathed in ammunition belts and defending his post singlehanded against fierce German attacks." Anthony Burgess declared: "Reconciling literature and action, he fulfilled for all writers, the sickroom dream of leaving the desk for the arena, and then returning to the desk. He wrote good and lived good, and both activities were the same. The pen handled with the accuracy of the rifle; sweat and dignity; bags of cojones. " Hemingway's search for truth and accuracy of expression is reflected in his terse, economical prose style, which is widely acknowledged to be his greatest contribution to literature. What Frederick J. Hoffman called Hemingway's "esthetic of simplicity" involves a "basic struggle for absolute accuracy in making words correspond to experience." For Hemingway, William Barrett commented, "style was a moral act, a desperate struggle for moral probity amid the confusions of the world and the slippery complexities of one's own nature. To set things down simple and right is to hold a standard of rightness against a deceiving world." In a discussion of Hemingway's style, Sheldon Norman Grebstein listed these characteristics: "first, short and simple sentence constructions, with heavy use of parallelism, which convey the effect of control, terseness, and blunt honesty; second, purged diction which above all eschews the use of bookish, latinate, or abstract words and thus achieves the effect of being heard or spoken or transcribed from reality rather than appearing as a construct of the imagination (in brief, verisimilitude); and third, skillful use of repetition and a kind of verbal counterpoint, which operate either by pairing or juxtaposing opposites, or else by running the same word or phrase through a series of shifting meanings and inflections." One of Hemingway's greatest virtues as a writer was his self-discipline. He described how he accomplished this in A Moveable Feast. "If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut that scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written.... I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about. I was trying to do this all the time I was writing, and it was good and severe discipline." His early training in journalism as a reporter for the Kansas City Star and the Toronto Star is often mentioned as a factor in the development of his lean style. Later, as a foreign correspondent he learned the even more rigorously economic language of "cablese," in which each word must convey the meaning of several others. While Hemingway acknowledged his debt to journalism in Death in the Afternoon by commenting that "in writing for a newspaper you told what happened and with one trick and another, you communicated the emotion to any account of something that has happened on that day," he admitted that the hardest part of fiction writing, "the real thing," was contriving "the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be valid in a year or ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always." Although Hemingway has named numerous writers as his literary influences, his contemporaries mentioned most often in this regard are Ring Lardner, Sherwood Anderson, Ezra Pound , and Gertrude Stein . Malcolm Cowley assessed the importance of Stein and Pound (who were both friends of Hemingway) to his literary development, while stressing that the educational relationship was mutual. "One thing he took partly from her [Stein] was a colloquial—in appearance—American style, full of repeated words, prepositional phrases, and present participles, the style in which he wrote his early published stories. One thing he took from Pound—in return for trying vainly to teach him to box—was the doctrine of the accurate image, which he applied in the 'chapters' printed between the stories that went into In Our Time; but Hemingway also learned from him to bluepencil most of his adjectives." Hemingway has commented that he learned how to write as much from painters as from other writers. Cezanne was one of his favorite painters and Wright Morris has compared Hemingway's stylistic method to that of Cezanne. "A Cezanne-like simplicity of scene is built up with the touches of a master, and the great effects are achieved with a sublime economy. At these moments style and substance are of one piece, each growing from the other, and one cannot imagine that life could exist except as described. We think only of what is there, and not, as in the less successful moments, of all of the elements of experience that are not." While most critics have found Hemingway's prose exemplary (Jackson J. Benson claimed that he had "perhaps the best ear that has ever been brought to the creation of English prose"), Leslie A. Fiedler complained that Hemingway learned to write "through the eye rather than the ear. If his language is colloquial, it is written colloquial, for he was constitutionally incapable of hearing English as it was spoken around him. To a critic who once asked him why his characters all spoke alike, Hemingway answered, 'Because I never listen to anybody.'" Hemingway's earlier novels and short stories were largely praised for their unique style. Paul Goodman , for example, was pleased with the "sweetness" of the writing in A Farewell to Arms. "When it [sweetness] appears, the short sentences coalesce and flow, and sing—sometimes melancholy, sometimes pastoral, sometimes personally embarrassed in an adult, not adolescent, way. In the dialogues, he pays loving attention to the spoken word. And the writing is meticulous; he is sweetly devoted to writing well. Most everything else is resigned, but here he makes an effort, and the effort produces lovely moments." But in his later works, particularly Across the River and Into the Trees and the posthumously published Islands in the Stream, the Hemingway style degenerated into near self-parody. "In the best of early Hemingway it always seemed that if exactly the right words in exactly the right order were not chosen, something monstrous would occur, an unimaginably delicate internal warning system would be thrown out of adjustment, and some principle of personal and artistic integrity would be fatally compromised," John Aldridge wrote. "But by the time he came to write The Old Man and the Sea there seems to have been nothing at stake except the professional obligation to sound as much like Hemingway as possible. The man had disappeared behind the mannerism, the artist behind the artifice, and all that was left was a coldly flawless facade of words." Foster Hirsch found that Hemingway's "mawkish self-consciousness is especially evident in Islands in the Stream." Across the River and Into the Trees, according to Philip Rahv, "reads like a parody by the author of his own manner—a parody so biting that it virtually destroys the mixed social and literary legend of Hemingway." And Carlos Baker wrote: "In the lesser works of his final years ... nostalgia drove him to the point of exploiting his personal idiosyncrasies, as if he hoped to persuade readers to accept these in lieu of that powerful union of objective discernment and subjective response which he had once been able to achieve." But Hemingway was never his own worst imitator. He was perhaps the most influential writer of his generation and scores of writers, particularly the hard-boiled writers of the thirties, attempted to adapt his tough, understated prose to their own works, usually without success. As Clinton S. Burhans, Jr., noted: "The famous and extraordinarily eloquent concreteness of Hemingway's style is inimitable precisely because it is not primarily stylistic: the how of Hemingway's style is the what of his characteristic vision." It is this organicism, the skillful blend of style and substance, that made Hemingway's works so successful, despite the fact that many critics have complained that he lacked vision. Hemingway avoided intellectualism because he thought it shallow and pretentious. His unique vision demanded the expression of emotion through the description of action rather than of passive thought. In Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway explained, "I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty, aside from knowing truly what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things were which produced the emotion you experienced." Even morality, for Hemingway, was a consequence of action and emotion. He stated his moral code in Death in the Afternoon: "What is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after." Lady Brett Ashley, in The Sun Also Rises, voices this pragmatic morality after she has decided to leave a young bullfighter, believing the break to be in his best interests. She says: "You know it makes one feel rather good deciding not to be a bitch.... It's sort of what we have instead of God." Hemingway's perception of the world as devoid of traditional values and truths and instead marked by disillusionment and moribund idealism, is a characteristically twentieth-century vision. World War I was a watershed for Hemingway and his generation. As an ambulance driver in the Italian infantry, Hemingway had been severely wounded. The war experience affected him profoundly, as he told Malcolm Cowley. "In the first war I was hurt very badly; in the body, mind, and spirit, and also morally." The heroes of his novels were similarly wounded. According to Max Westbrook they "awake to a world gone to hell. World War I has destroyed belief in the goodness of national governments. The depression has isolated man from his natural brotherhood. Institutions, concepts, and insidious groups of friends and ways of life are, when accurately seen, a tyranny, a sentimental or propagandistic rationalization." Both of Hemingway's first two major novels, The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms, were "primarily descriptions of a society that had lost the possibility of belief. They were dominated by an atmosphere of Gothic ruin, boredom, sterility and decay," John Aldridge wrote. "Yet if they had been nothing more than descriptions, they would inevitably have been as empty of meaning as the thing they were describing." While Alan Lebowitz contended that because the theme of despair "is always an end in itself, the fiction merely its transcription,... it is a dead end," Aldridge believed that Hemingway managed to save the novels by salvaging the characters' values and transcribing them "into a kind of moral network that linked them together in a unified pattern of meaning." In the search for meaning Hemingway's characters necessarily confront violence. Omnipresent violence is a fact of existence, according to Hemingway. Even in works such as The Sun Also Rises in which violence plays a minimal role, it is always present subliminally—"woven into the structure of life itself," William Barrett remarked. In other works violence is more obtrusive: the wars in A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls, the hostility of nature which is particularly evident in the short stories, and the violent sports such as bullfighting and big game hunting that are portrayed in numerous works. "Hemingway is the dramatist of the extreme situation. His overriding theme is honour, personal honour: by what shall a man live, by what shall a man die, in a world the essential condition of whose being is violence?" Walter Allen wrote. "These problems are posed rather than answered in his first book In Our Time, a collection of short stories in which almost all of Hemingway's later work is contained by implication." The code by which Hemingway's heroes must live (Philip Young has termed them "code heroes") is contingent on the qualities of courage, self-control, and "grace under pressure." Irving Howe has described the typical Hemingway hero as a man "who is wounded but bears his wounds in silence, who is defeated but finds a remnant of dignity in an honest confrontation of defeat." Furthermore, the hero's great desire must be to "salvage from the collapse of social life a version of stoicism that can make suffering bearable; the hope that in direct physical sensation, the cold water of the creek in which one fishes or the purity of the wine made by Spanish peasants, there can be found an experience that can resist corruption." Hemingway has been accused of exploiting and sensationalizing violence. However, Leo Gurko remarked that "the motive behind Hemingway's heroic figures is not glory, or fortune, or the righting of injustice, or the thirst for experience. They are inspired neither by vanity nor ambition nor a desire to better the world. They have no thoughts of reaching a state of higher grace or virtue. Instead, their behavior is a reaction to the moral emptiness of the universe, an emptiness that they feel compelled to fill by their own special efforts." If life is an endurance contest and the hero's response to it is prescribed and codified, the violence itself is stylized. As William Barrett asserted: "It is always played, even in nature, perhaps above all in nature, according to some form. The violence erupts within the patterns of war or the patterns of the bullring." Clinton S. Burhans, Jr., is convinced that Hemingway's "fascination with bullfighting stems from his view of it as an art form, a ritual tragedy in which man confronts the creatural realities of violence, pain, suffering, and death by imposing on them an esthetic form which gives them order, significance, and beauty." It is not necessary (or even possible) to understand the complex universe—it is enough for Hemingway's heroes to find solace in beauty and order. Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea cannot understand why he must kill the great fish he has come to love, Burhans noted. Hemingway described Santiago's confusion: "I do not understand these things, he thought. But it is good we do not try to kill the sun or the moon or the stars. It is enough to live on the sea and kill our brothers." Despite Hemingway's pessimism, Ihab Hassan declared that it is "perverse to see only the emptiness of Hemingway's world. In its lucid spaces, a vision of archetypal unity reigns. Opposite forces obey a common destiny; enemies discover their deeper identity; the hunter and the hunted merge. The matador plunges his sword, and for an instant in eternity, man and beast are the same. This is the moment of truth, and it serves Hemingway as symbol of the unity which underlies both love and death. His fatalism, his tolerance of bloodshed, his stoical reserve before the malice of creation, betray a sacramental attitude that transcends any personal fate." Death is not the ultimate fear: the Hemingway hero knows how to confront death. What he truly fears is nada (the Spanish word for nothing)-existence in a state of nonbeing. Hemingway's characters are alone. He is not concerned with human relationships as much as with portraying man's individual struggle against an alien, chaotic universe. His characters exist in the "island condition," Stephen L. Tanner has noted. He compared them to the islands of an archipelago "consistently isolated [and] alone in the stream of society." Several critics have noted that Hemingway's novels suffer because of his overriding concern with the individual. For Whom the Bell Tolls, a novel about the Spanish Civil War, has engendered controversy on this matter. While it is ostensibly a political novel about a cause that Hemingway believed in fervently, critics such as Alvah C. Bessie were disappointed that Hemingway was still concerned exclusively with the personal. "The cause of Spain does not, in any essential way, figure as a motivating power, a driving, emotional, passional force in this story." Bessie wrote. "In the widest sense, that cause is actually irrelevant to the narrative. For the author is less concerned with the fate of the Spanish people, whom I am certain he loves, than he is with the fate of his hero and heroine, who are himself.... For all his groping the author of the Bell has yet to integrate his individual sensitivity to life with the sensitivity of every living human being (read the Spanish people); he has yet to expand his personality as a novelist to embrace the truths of other people, everywhere; he has yet to dive deep into the lives of others, and there to find his own." But Mark Schorer contended that in For Whom the Bell Tolls Hemingway's motive is to portray "a tremendous sense of man's dignity and worth, an urgent awareness of the necessity of man's freedom, a nearly poetic realization of man's collective virtues. Indeed, the individual vanishes in the political whole, but vanishes precisely to defend his dignity, his freedom, his virtue. In spite of the ominous premium which the title seems to place on individuality, the real theme of the book is the relative unimportance of individuality and the superb importance of the political whole." Hemingway's depiction of relationships between men and women is generally considered to be his weakest area as a writer. Leslie A. Fiedler has noted that he is only really comfortable dealing with men without women. His women characters often seem to be abstractions rather than portraits of real women. Often reviewers have divided them into two types: the bitches such as Brett and Margot Macomber who emasculate the men in their lives, and the wish-projections, the sweet, submissive women such as Catherine and Maria (in For Whom the Bell Tolls ). All of the characterizations lack subtlety and shading. The love affair between Catherine and Frederic in A Farewell to Arms is only an "abstraction of lyric emotion," Edmund Wilson commented. Fiedler complained that "in his earlier fiction, Hemingway's descriptions of the sexual encounter are intentionally brutal, in his later ones, unintentionally comic; for in no case, can he quite succeed in making his females human.... If in For Whom the Bell Tolls Hemingway has written the most absurd love scene in the history of the American novel, this is not because he lost momentarily his skill and authority; it is a give-away—a moment which illuminates the whole erotic content of his fiction." In 1921, when Hemingway and his family moved to the Left Bank of Paris (then the literature, art, and music capital of the world), he became associated with other American expatriates, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Archibald MacLeish , E. E. Cummings , and John Dos Passos. These expatriates and the whole generation which came of age in the period between the two world wars came to be known as the "lost generation." For Hemingway the term had more universal meaning. In A Moveable Feast he wrote that being lost is part of the human condition—that all generations are lost generations. Hemingway also believed in the cyclicality of the world. As inscriptions to his novel The Sun Also Rises, he used two quotations: first, Gertrude Stein's comment, "You are all a lost generation"; then a verse from Ecclesiastes which begins, "One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth forever...." The paradox of regeneration evolving from death is central to Hemingway's vision. The belief in immortality is comforting, of course, and Hemingway evidently found comfort in permanence and endurance. According to Steven R. Phillips, Hemingway discovered permanence in "the sense of immortality that he gains from the otherwise impermanent art of the bullfight, in the fact that the 'earth abideth forever,' in the eternal flow of the gulf stream and in the permanence of his own works of art." Hemingway's greatest depiction of endurance is in The Old Man and the Sea in which "he succeeds in a manner which almost defeats critical description," Phillips claimed. "The old man becomes the sea and like the sea he endures. He is dying as the year is dying. He is fishing in September, the fall of the year, the time that corresponds in the natural cycle to the phase of sunset and sudden death.... Yet the death of the old man will not bring an end to the cycle; as part of the sea he will continue to exist." Hemingway was inordinately proud of his own powers of rejuvenation, and in a letter to his friend Archibald MacLeish, he explained that his maxim was: " Dans la vie, il faut (d'abord) durer. " ("In life, one must [first of all] endure.") He had survived physical disasters (including two near-fatal plane crashes in Africa in 1954) and disasters of critical reception to his work ( Across the River and Into the Trees was almost universally panned). But due to his great recuperative powers he was able to rebound from these hardships. He made a literary comeback with the publication of The Old Man and the Sea, which is considered to be among his finest works, and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1953. In 1954 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. But the last few years of his life were marked by great physical and emotional suffering. He was no longer able to write—to do the thing he loved the most. Finally Hemingway could endure no longer and, in 1961, he took his own life. In the 1980s Scribner published two additional posthumous works— The Dangerous Summer and The Garden of Eden. Written in 1959 while Hemingway was in Spain on commission for Life magazine, The Dangerous Summer describes the intense and bloody competition between two prominent bullfighters. The Garden of Eden, a novel about newlyweds who experience marital conflict while traveling through Spain on their honeymoon, was begun by Hemingway in the 1940s and finished fifteen years later. While interest in these works was high, critics judged neither book to rival the thematic and stylistic achievements of his earlier works, which have made Hemingway a major figure in modern American literature. The fifth of Hemingway's posthumous publications, a self-termed fictional memoir titled True at First Light , was released on July 21, 1999 to coincide with the 100th anniversary of his birth. The book, edited by Hemingway's middle son, Patrick, and pared down to half the length of the original manuscript, recounts a Kenyan safari excursion that Hemingway took with his fourth wife, Mary, in 1953. The story centers around Mary's preoccupation with killing a lion who is threatening the villagers' safety, and the narrator's involvement with a woman from the Wakamba tribe, whom he calls his "fiancée." Many critics expressed disappointment over True at First Light for its peripatetic lack of vision, its abdication of intellectual intent (what New York Times critic James Wood termed "a nullification of thought") and its tepid prose. Kenneth S. Lynn, writing for the National Review , pointed out that "Ernest Hemingway's name is on the cover, but the publication of True at First Light is an important event in celebrity culture, not in literary culture. For the grim fact is that this 'fictional memoir' . . .reflects a marvelous writer's disastrous loss of talent." Many of the critics pointed to Hemingway's increasing preoccupation with the myth of his own machismo as a catalyst for the devolution of his writing. New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani commented, "As in so much of Hemingway's later work, all this spinning of his own legend is reflected in the deterioration of his prose. What was special—and at the time, galvanic—about his early writing was its precision and concision: Hemingway not only knew what to leave out, but he also succeeded in turning that austerity into a moral outlook, a way of looking at a world shattered and remade by World War I. His early work had a clean, hard objectivity: it did not engage in meaningless abstractions; it tried to show, not tell." True at First Light also inflamed classic critical debate over the true ownership of authorial intention. While Hemingway's physical and mental deterioration, toward the end of his life, rendered his final wishes for unpublished works unclear, many critics have objected to the posthumous "franchise" of his deepest failures, novels that he, himself, abandoned. James Wood offered the observation that True at First Light 's lack of substance may serve "as a warning to let Hemingway be, both as a literary estate and as a literary influence." There is evidence, however, that the literary storm the book stirred would not have bothered Hemingway much. As Tom Jenks pointed out in a review for Harper's , "Hemingway's own belief was that in a writer's lifetime his reputation depended on the quantity and median of his work, but that after his death he would be remembered only for his best." If this is true, then, as one Publishers Weekly reviewer opined, perhaps True at First Light will "inspire new readers to delve into Hemingway's true legacy." In 2002, Cuban and American officials reached an agreement that permits U.S. scholars access to Hemingway's papers that have remained in his Havana home since the author's death in 1961. The collection contains 3,000 photographs, 9,000 books, and 3,000 letters, and will be available on microfilm at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, Massachusetts. Efforts to gain access to the collection were led by Jenny Phillips, the granddaughter of Maxwell Perkins, Hemingway's long-time editor.

Camping Out, by Ernest Hemingway

Central Press/Getty Images

• An Introduction to Punctuation
• Ph.D., Rhetoric and English, University of Georgia
• M.A., Modern English and American Literature, University of Leicester
• B.A., English, State University of New York

Before publishing his first major novel, The Sun Also Rises , in 1926, Ernest Hemingway worked as a reporter for the Toronto Daily Star . Though he thought it was unflattering to see his "newspaper stuff" compared to his fiction, the line between Hemingway's factual and fictional writings was often blurred. As William White notes in his introduction to By-line: Ernest Hemingway (1967), he regularly "took pieces he first filed with magazines and newspapers and published them with virtually no change in his own books as short stories."

Hemingway's famously economical style is already on display in this article from June 1920, an instructional piece (developed by process analysis ) on setting up camp and cooking outdoors.

Camping Out

by Ernest Hemingway

Thousands of people will go into the bush this summer to cut the high cost of living. A man who gets his two weeks’ salary while he is on vacation should be able to put those two weeks in fishing and camping and be able to save one week’s salary clear. He ought to be able to sleep comfortably every night, to eat well every day and to return to the city rested and in good condition.

But if he goes into the woods with a frying pan, an ignorance of black flies and mosquitoes, and a great and abiding lack of knowledge about cookery, the chances are that his return will be very different. He will come back with enough mosquito bites to make the back of his neck look like a relief map of the Caucasus. His digestion will be wrecked after a valiant battle to assimilate half-cooked or charred grub. And he won’t have had a decent night’s sleep while he has been gone.

He will solemnly raise his right hand and inform you that he has joined the grand army of never-agains. The call of the wild may be all right, but it’s a dog’s life. He’s heard the call of the tame with both ears. Waiter, bring him an order of milk toast.

In the first place, he overlooked the insects. Black flies, no-see-ums, deer flies , gnats and mosquitoes were instituted by the devil to force people to live in cities where he could get at them better. If it weren’t for them everybody would live in the bush and he would be out of work. It was a rather successful invention.

But there are lots of dopes that will counteract the pests. The simplest perhaps is oil of citronella. Two bits’ worth of this purchased at any pharmacist’s will be enough to last for two weeks in the worst fly and mosquito-ridden country.

Rub a little on the back of your neck, your forehead, and your wrists before you start fishing, and the blacks and skeeters will shun you. The odor of citronella is not offensive to people. It smells like gun oil. But the bugs do hate it.

Oil of pennyroyal and eucalyptol are also much hated by mosquitoes, and with citronella, they form the basis for many proprietary preparations. But it is cheaper and better to buy the straight citronella . Put a little on the mosquito netting that covers the front of your pup tent or canoe tent at night, and you won’t be bothered.

To be really rested and get any benefit out of a vacation a man must get a good night’s sleep every night. The first requisite for this is to have plenty of cover. It is twice as cold as you expect it will be in the bush four nights out of five, and a good plan is to take just double the bedding that you think you will need. An old quilt that you can wrap up in is as warm as two blankets.

Nearly all outdoor writers rhapsodize over the browse bed. It is all right for the man who knows how to make one and has plenty of time. But in a succession of one-night camps on a canoe trip all you need is level ground for your tent floor and you will sleep all right if you have plenty of covers under you. Take twice as much cover as you think that you will need, and then put two-thirds of it under you. You will sleep warm and get your rest.

When it is clear weather you don’t need to pitch your tent if you are only stopping for the night. Drive four stakes at the head of your made-up bed and drape your mosquito bar over that, then you can sleep like a log and laugh at the mosquitoes.

Outside of insects and bum sleeping the rock that wrecks most camping trips is cooking. The average tyro’s idea of cooking is to fry everything and fry it good and plenty. Now, a frying pan is a most necessary thing to any trip, but you also need the old stew kettle and the folding reflector baker.

A pan of fried trout can’t be bettered and they don’t cost any more than ever. But there is a good and bad way of frying them.

The beginner puts his trout and his bacon in and over a brightly burning fire; the bacon curls up and dries into a dry tasteless cinder and the trout is burned outside while it is still raw inside. He eats them and it is all right if he is only out for the day and going home to a good meal at night. But if he is going to face more trout and bacon the next morning and other equally well-cooked dishes for the remainder of two weeks he is on the pathway to nervous dyspepsia.

The proper way is to cook over coals. Have several cans of Crisco or Cotosuet or one of the vegetable shortenings along that are as good as lard and excellent for all kinds of shortening. Put the bacon in and when it is about half cooked lay the trout in the hot grease, dipping them in cornmeal first. Then put the bacon on top of the trout and it will baste them as it slowly cooks.

The coffee can be boiling at the same time and in a smaller skillet pancakes being made that are satisfying the other campers while they are waiting for the trout.

With the prepared pancake flours you take a cupful of pancake flour and add a cup of water. Mix the water and flour and as soon as the lumps are out it is ready for cooking. Have the skillet hot and keep it well greased. Drop the batter in and as soon as it is done on one side loosen it in the skillet and flip it over. Apple butter, syrup or cinnamon and sugar go well with the cakes.

While the crowd have taken the edge from their appetites with flapjacks the trout have been cooked and they and the bacon are ready to serve. The trout are crisp outside and firm and pink inside and the bacon is well done—but not too done. If there is anything better than that combination the writer has yet to taste it in a lifetime devoted largely and studiously to eating.

The stew kettle will cook your dried apricots when they have resumed their predried plumpness after a night of soaking, it will serve to concoct a mulligan in, and it will cook macaroni. When you are not using it, it should be boiling water for the dishes.

In the baker, mere man comes into his own, for he can make a pie that to his bush appetite will have it all over the product that mother used to make, like a tent. Men have always believed that there was something mysterious and difficult about making a pie. Here is a great secret. There is nothing to it. We’ve been kidded for years. Any man of average office intelligence can make at least as good a pie as his wife.

All there is to a pie is a cup and a half of flour, one-half teaspoonful of salt, one-half cup of lard and cold water. That will make pie crust that will bring tears of joy into your camping partner’s eyes.

Mix the salt with the flour, work the lard into the flour, make it up into a good workmanlike dough with cold water. Spread some flour on the back of a box or something flat, and pat the dough around a while. Then roll it out with whatever kind of round bottle you prefer. Put a little more lard on the surface of the sheet of dough and then slosh a little flour on and roll it up and then roll it out again with the bottle.

Cut out a piece of the rolled out dough big enough to line a pie tin. I like the kind with holes in the bottom. Then put in your dried apples that have soaked all night and been sweetened, or your apricots, or your blueberries, and then take another sheet of the dough and drape it gracefully over the top, soldering it down at the edges with your fingers. Cut a couple of slits in the top dough sheet and prick it a few times with a fork in an artistic manner.

Put it in the baker with a good slow fire for forty-five minutes and then take it out and if your pals are Frenchmen they will kiss you. The penalty for knowing how to cook is that the others will make you do all the cooking.

It is all right to talk about roughing it in the woods. But the real woodsman is the man who can be really comfortable in the bush.

"Camping Out" by Ernest Hemingway was originally published in the  Toronto Daily Star  on June 26, 1920.

• Imitation in Rhetoric and Composition
• Didacticism: Definition and Examples in Literature
• Organizational Strategies for Using Chronological Order in Writing
• Definition and Examples of Parody in English
• Verbless Sentence (Scesis Onomaton)
• Past Perfect Progressive (Verbs)
• Coordinate Clause in Grammar
• How to Identify Sentences by Function
• Classic British and American Essays and Speeches
• Coordinating Words, Phrases, and Clauses in English Grammar
• Fronting: Definition and Examples
• 100 Awfully Good Examples of Oxymorons
• Adverb (Adverbial) Clause Definition and Examples
• Parataxis (grammar and prose style)
• What Is the Running Style in English Prose?
• Definition and Examples of Vignettes in Prose

124 Ernest Hemingway Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

🏆 best ernest hemingway topic ideas & essay examples, 💡 interesting topics to write about ernest hemingway, 📌 simple & easy ernest hemingway essay titles, 👍 good essay topics on ernest hemingway.

• Hemingway’s Code Hero in The Old Man and the Sea. Traits & Definition To solve the misconception, Hemingway sets in with his The Old Man and the Sea, featuring Santiago, an aged angler and an epitome of code heroes.
• Symbols of Nihilism in the Hemingway’s “Sun Also Rises” and ”Own Life” Thus, Ernest Hemingway makes extensive use of symbolism in order to convey nihilistic themes, because the main hero of The Sun Also Rises is a symbol of nihilism, the main heroine of The Sun Also […]
• Marriage Relationships in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” by Hemingway Harry and his wife, Helen, are stranded in Mount Kilimanjaro and their interactions reveal that their rocky relationship is a result of a mixture of frustration, incorrect decisions, getting married for wrong reasons, and unreciprocated […]
• “Wedding Day” in “The Nick Adams” by Ernest Hemingway The readers are invited to see Nick and Hemingway himself as Nick’s prototype in a new light of a lover and a young husband.
• Landscape Symbolism in Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” The author’s depiction of Ebro valley in this literary work is symbolic of a choice to have a child, and the dry, treeless land on the opposite side is representative of the life after abortion.
• “The Snows of Mt. Kilimanjaro” by E. Hemingway A short story uses all the elements of that genre to develop his or her theme; in fact, all the elements are used to lead the reader to the central meaning of the work.
• Gender Identity in Hemingway’s “Garden of Eden” She asserts that the man in the newspaper is a different man than the one she is married to because the one she is married to could never dream of being mentioned anywhere without having […]
• Human Victory in “The Old Man and the Sea” by Hemingway “[…] he wrote about pity: about something somewhere that made them all: the old man who had to catch the fish and then lose it, the fish that had to be caught and then lost, […]
• William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway Comparison The story is written from the perspectives of Emily and the community and combines the past and the future to depict power and love.
• Imagery Analysis of Hemingway’s “Cat in the Rain” Hemingway employed imagery in the “Cat in the Rain” when describing the Italian hotel, setting the mood for the short narrative.
• Ernest Hemingway’s “The End of Something” Story The fish, not striking symbolizes a lack of interest in Nick’s in his relationship with Marjorie. In reference to the love he shared with Marjorie, Nick says “It is not fun anymore.
• “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” by Hemingway I believe firmly that the cause of death of Macomber was an intentional act, this is because of the intimate relationship of the intertwined sequence of the events that took place prior to the act.
• Hemingway’s “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” The younger one is in a hurry to go home, the older one hesitates, he clearly does not want to leave, although it is already deep night. There are no human meanings in the world: […]
• Hills Like White Elephants Analysis Hemingway wrote ‘Hills like White Elephants’ in the third-person perspective that restricts the tale to the words and actions of the characters.
• Ernest Hemingway’s Personality and His Reflections on WWI The events of World War I and Hemmingway’s personal experiences seemed to have an impact on his writings as he sought to establish himself alongside great writers in the Lost Generation, thus portraying his sensitivity.
• “Soldier’s Home” by Ernest Hemingway Harold’s relaxed existence appears meaningless to his mother, who represents the traditional Protestant values of work and family, of everyone’s life subordinated to the eternal laws of the Kingdom of God.
• Ernest Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises In Ernest Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises, women are a ubiquitous part of the story, and even central to the plot.
• Critical Analysis of “Hills Like White Elephants” by E. Hemingway The man and the woman perceive the situation differently; for her, the topic of abortion is acute and worries her, while “he feels it as a simple, quick remedy to a removable annoyance”.
• Ernest Hemingway and the Aspects of American Values and Self-Image In order to discuss Hemingway’s depiction of the American values and beliefs, it will be necessary to use three works: The Old Man and the Sea, a novella by Hemingway, “Papa’s Ghost”, an article by […]
• Hemingway’s Santiago as an Everyman Through the words of the old man Hemingway tries to bring to the world his conviction that it is the purpose of every man to struggle in life and never surrender: “A man can be […]
• Ambiguity in E. Hemingway’s Novel “The Sun Also Rises” The foremost psychological difference between men and women is that men are expected to be capable of suppressing their animalistic urges, to be able to act “as necessary”, as opposed to women’s tendency to act […]
• The Old Man and the Sea by Hemingway In The Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway reveals his conception of heroism not as a measure of the glory and recognition his character receives, but instead in the determination of the struggle.
• “Cross Country Snow” by Hemingway The hesitancy and repetition of phrases, the parallels of contrast, express and enforce the strong bound between George and Nick. In the case of George and Nick they form the basis of their relationship.
• Symbolism in Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” The only thing that was discovered is the meaning of the idiom “the hills like white elephants,” which refers to something precious, but useless.
• Henry’s Change in Hemingway’s “A Farewell to Arms” Thus, Henry’s changes in war perspectives should become a good example of how the attitudes of one person might affect others.
• The Short Story “Hills Like White Elephants” by Ernest Hemingway The description of nature precedes the dialogues, and in the first paragraph, the Ebro Valley is presented. The unwillingness of a man to understand, support and simply immerse in thoughts with the girl can be […]
• Hills Like White Elephants. A Short Story by Ernest Hemingway While Jig realizes that she is not ready for the “small operation” that the American suggest and insists, she is unable to express her concern and decision not to take the “small operation”.
• Hills Like White Elephants by Ernest Hemingway For the heroine, abortion is the collapse of last hope, leading only to the continuation of a meaningless life. Consequently, abortion is a crime against the life of a human person.
• Ernest Hemingway’s Creative Process Hemingway explained that it look a lot of energy and will power to put aside the stories that he was working on when he was away from his typewriter.
• Curtain as an Imagery of Separation in Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” A suitable passage to illustrate the author’s use of the curtain as a device symbolizing and bringing forward the separation between the main characters is the excerpt when it is first introduced.
• Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants”: American’s Personality However, as the conversation between the American and the girl goes on, the reader learns the name of the female character.
• Age Concept in “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” by Ernest Hemingway The author had illustrated different stages of human life with the help of illustrating characters of old waiter, young waiter and an old man at the cafe.
• Henry’s Change of Attitude in Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms The other specific traumatic events in A Farewell to Arms are closely related to the terrible scenes during the war and the job threatening the protagonist’s life.
• The Multilayered Nature of Hemingway’s Literature One can trace this particular feature of the author’s style to the example of his novels and the characteristic features of the heroes.
• ‘A Farewell to Arms’: Unraveling Henry’s Character Arc A Farewell to Arms by Hemingway showed me that a significant shift in my worldview in a more skeptical and pessimistic way was due not to my growing up but rather to the COVID-19 crisis.
• “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” by Ernest Hemingway Review In A Clean Well-Lighted Place, the reader seems to be expected to read between the lines to understand the setting. It appears that the setting is a conservative Spanish-speaking country where it can get dusty […]
• Responses to Hills Like White Elephants by Hemingway The girl’s fears and doubts contrast with the man’s confidence and reassurance attempts, resulting in a substantial dramatic context behind the casual conversation.
• Response to Ernest Hemingway’s Writing Hemingway showed that he appreciated the moments of crisis and clash with reality in his life: as frightening a bullfight in his story as the death of a loved one.
• “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” by Hemingway: Analysis The main topics in this instance are the meaninglessness of life and one’s awareness of it. The old man in this story is the person whose only pleasure is light and cleanliness.
• Theme in “The Hills Like Elephants” by Hemingway and “The Swimmer” by Cheever However, by the end of the story, it is easy to comprehend that Neddy does not have close people. Neddy is alone and lonely, a common theme for this and The Hills Like Elephants story.
• “A Farewell to Arms” by Hemingway In everyday life, only a tiny fraction of the issues can make the same impression on the psyche as the war.
• The Novel “Farewell to Arms” by Ernest Hemingway Thus, in “Farewell to Arms” by Hemingway, the brutality of war influenced the change in the hero’s views, and his opinion was formed by the senselessness of war, which are essential foundations for the prevention […]
• Trauma in Ernest Hemingway’s Short Stories With the growing awareness of the importance of critical thinking and considering that it is a skill that needs to be learned and practiced, the Israeli Educational System urges instructors to consider using the strategy […]
• Frederic Henry’s Change in Hemingway’s “A Farewell to Arms” The main character finds himself troubled in defining his position in the war due to being a foreigner in Europe. When Henry was in the position of an outside observer, he could freely think about […]
• Personal Perspective on Hemingway’s “A Farewell to Arms” The novel A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway demonstrates the similarities between my life and Henry’s, resulting in a metamorphosis due to improved knowledge.
• Frederick Henry in “A Farewell to Arms” by Hemingway Once, a nurse asked him about the reason for such an attitude, and he answered: “I was in Italy, and I spoke Italian”.
• Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” and Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” Hemingway’s Hills Like White Elephants and Pound’s In A Station of the Metro share several similarities even though they belong to different literary genres.
• Hemingway’, Hughes’, and Jimenez’ Stories Comparison From the insights of Panchito’s feelings and thoughts that Jimenez gives to the reader, it becomes clear that the boy can only dream of a life in a house, away from any worry.
• An Alternative View in Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” The frivolity of the man is expressed in belittling the seriousness of abortion and unwillingness to disclose the subject. He probably does not do this out of malice or intentionally; there is a big misunderstanding […]
• Analysis of “Hills Like White Elephants” by Ernest Hemingway The couple sits facing the side of the valley with no trees, and there is a brown area in the distance, which is in great need of water.
• ‘Hills Like White Elephants’: Hemingway’s Subtle Artistry The central conflict within the narrative lies in the American’s objection to the progressive needs of her lover, such as keeping a family.
• Women in Relationships: Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” & Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” They explore the topic of the position of women in a relationship at the beginning of the twentieth century from a different point of view, which adds value to their joint analysis.
• New World: Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” and Hemingway’s “In Our Time” The major intention of his writing was to appreciate the engineering work that allowed the completion of the canal, the intercontinental railway as well as the fixation of the Atlantic wire/cable.
• “Hills Like White Elephants” by Ernest Hemingway: Analysis of Literature Tools It is very unfortunate that instead of her enjoying the company of the man while waiting for the train, she feels he is a bother to her and deserves to keep silent.
• “A Farewell to Arms” by Ernest Hemingway Review Catherine is also undergoing a difficult time with the death of her fiance and the horrors of war. Catherine is pregnant and in need of a place to stay for the arrival of the baby.
• “The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World” by Marquez and ”Nobody Ever Dies” by Hemingway The first and the most evident similarity of the works mentioned above is the authors’ intent to rise above the earthly, primitive understanding of life and death and to show their personal perception of these […]
• Soldier’s Home by Ernest Hemingway and War Experiences The thesis of this paper is in the form of an argument to convince the readers that Krebs’s laziness comes from his inability to adapt himself to the changing patterns of life, which society imposes […]
• “The Sun Also Rises” Novel by Ernest Hemingway Cohn states, that he is dissatisfied with his life in Paris, and he believes, that the change of the surrounding scenery would help him to fill the void that he feels in the life.
• Unhappy Relationships in Hemingway’s Life and Fiction In “The Short and Happy Life of Francis Macomber”, Hemingway reveals his latent fear of strong women and being dominated as he depicts the story of a middle-aged man who is finally beginning to understand […]
• Exile and Escape in Hemingway’s “Soldier’s Home” Hence, the decision he takes could explore his temperament and hence reading the themes of exile and escape in Hemingway’s Soldier’s Home is an interesting study of these sensitive concepts as caricatured in the protagonist, […]
• Margot Macomber: A Victim of Hemingway’s Masculine Throughout the story, she is described in unflattering and dominant terms such as ‘hard,’ ‘cruel’ or ‘predatory.’ From the beginning of the story, it is clear that Margot cannot stand the shame of her husband’s […]
• Male Characters in Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises” It is clear that Brett and Jake’s love is reciprocal when Jake tries to kiss Brett on the cab ride home: “‘You must not.
• Ernest Hemingway’s Masculine Dominance However, he was dedicated to his craft and to the integrity of his stories; an integral aspect of this dedication was presenting experiences as realistically as possible.
• The Image of a Modern Man in Hemingway’s “The Chauffeurs of Madrid” and Steinbeck’s “The Chrysanthemums” This final phase of The Chauffeurs of Madrid reiterates that Hipolito is what a modern man should be in the face of war, according to Hemingway.
• “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” a Story by Ernest Hemingway After all the emotional suffering he had taken her through, Harry is touched by the fact that she manages to remain loving and friendly.
• Symbols in Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” At the end of the story, a man offers to “take the bags over to the other side of the station”, where no hope for childbirth and their relations is seen.
• Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Eliot Works Comparison In addition to the Great War, urbanization, immigration, and the rapid progress of technology led to the general feeling of uncertainty due to the rejection of old, traditional ideas.
• Gender Role in Henrik Ibsen and Ernest Hemingway Works The main theme of the play is social and gender roles as perceived by the patriarchy and a woman’s duties and roles in a marriage.
• Hills Like White Elephants by Hemingway The setting of the place also seems perfect for the discussion that the couple had. This demonstrates that she is comfortable with the pregnancy should it happen to be the outcome of their action.
• “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” a Novel by Ernest Hemingway It is rather late and he is the only visitor in the cafe. It is very symbolic that the old man is the only visitor of the cafe.
• Different Aspects of Culture in Hemingway, Wilson and O’Connor In A Good Man is Hard to Find, the cultural feature that the story describes which continues today is the belief that the past represents a better version of American culture than the present, and […]
• “A & P” by John Updike and “Soldiers Home” by Ernest Hemingway The presence of the girls at the supermarket confused Sammy and at one time this confusion led him to make a second call to a customer that he had already called.
• Hills Like White Elephants – Ernest Hemingway The American man manages to manipulate Jig psychologically by telling her not to abort if she does not want to because he senses her hesitance, “I think it’s the best thing to do.
• The Use of Language and Images in Ernest Hemingway’s A Clean Well-Lighted Place
• The Works of Ernest Hemingway That Reflects Aspects of His Own Life and the Twentieth Century
• The Lack of Communication in The Cat in the Rain, a Short story by Ernest Hemingway
• The Struggle of Gender Communication Differences Within Hills Like White Elephants by Ernest Hemingway
• The Impact of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises
• The Versions of Masculinity in The Sun Also Rises, a Novel by Ernest Hemingway
• The Lives of the Lost Generation in the Novel The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
• The Use of Characterization, Setting, and Symbolism to Develop the Struggles of Krebs in the Novel Soldier’s Home by Ernest Hemingway
• Works of Herman Melville and Ernest Hemingway and the Uses of Phallic Symbolism
• The Use of Dialogues in Hills Like White Elephants, a Short Story by Ernest Hemingway
• The Life-Changing Decisions in Hills Like White Elephants by Ernest Hemingway
• The Similarities in Another Country, the Big Two-Hearted River, and Indian Camp by Ernest Hemingway
• Trying to Find Meaning in “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” by Ernest Hemingway
• The Relationship Between Brett and Robert in The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
• The Religious Influence and Symbolism in The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
• Why Santiago Lost the Prize He Was After in The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
• Treating Women and Men Differently in the Stories of Ernest Hemingway
• The Legacy of Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea, a Novel by Ernest Hemingway
• The Use of Narration and Dialogue in a Clean, Well-Lighted Place by Ernest Hemingway
• The Exploration of Dominance and Struggles in the Story The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber by Ernest Hemingway
• The Struggles of the Italian Army in A Farwell to Arms, written by Ernest Hemingway
• The Symbolism of Darkness and Light in A Clean Well-lighted Place by Ernest Hemingway
• The Major Places in the Setting in The Sun Also Rises, a Novel by Ernest Hemingway
• The Theme of the “Failed Artist” in Ernest Hemingway’s Short Story, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”
• Weaknesses that Wealth Creates According to the Stories of Ernest Hemingway
• The Writing Style of Ernest Hemingway, an American Novelist and Short-Story Writer
• The Issue of Abortion in Hills Like White Elephants, a Short Story by Ernest Hemingway
• The Role of the Man of War Bird to Santiago in the Old Man and the Sea, a Novel by Ernest Hemingway
• The Understanding of Humanity in A Clean Well-Lighted Place, a Short Story by Ernest Hemingway
• The Use of the Iceberg Principle in the Novel, The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
• The Title, Importance of Time, and the Cyclical Motif of The Sun Also Rises, a Novel by Ernest Hemingway
• The Themes of Racism and Jealousy in the Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
• The Hardships of Coming Home from War Described in Soldiers Home by Ernest Hemingway and Speaking of Courage by Tim O’Brien
• The Theme of Despair and Insomnia in A Clean, Well-Lighted Place, a Short Story by Ernest Hemingway
• The Struggles of Man and Nature in The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
• The Time of the American Expatriates & The ‘Lost Generation’ in Ernest Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises”
• Underlying Meanings In Hills Like White Elephants By Ernest Hemingway
• The Internal and External Conflict of Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea, a Novel by Ernest Hemingway
• The Strengths Of The Female Characters In A Farewell To Arms And For Whom The Bell Tolls: Books Written By Ernest Hemingway
• The Murder of Francis Macomber in The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber by Ernest Hemingway
• The Perspective of Existential Despair in A Clean, Well-Lighted Place, a Short Story by Ernest Hemingway
• The Usage of Male Perspective to Reflect Ernest Hemingway’s Narrative Thought
• The Similarities and Differences Between the Writers of the Lost Generation, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner
• The Story of Old Age and Loneliness in A Clean, Well-Lighted Place, a Short Story by Ernest Hemingway
• The Important Role of the Character of George in Cat in the Rain, a Short Story by Ernest Hemingway
• Sir Gawain and the Green Knight Research Topics
• The Chrysanthemums Paper Topics
• The Great Gatsby Ideas
• The Yellow Wallpaper Ideas
• The Picture of Dorian Gray Questions
• Surrealism Research Topics
• Pride and Prejudice Essay Ideas
• I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings Research Ideas
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2024, February 28). 124 Ernest Hemingway Essay Topic Ideas & Examples. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/ernest-hemingway-essay-topics/

"124 Ernest Hemingway Essay Topic Ideas & Examples." IvyPanda , 28 Feb. 2024, ivypanda.com/essays/topic/ernest-hemingway-essay-topics/.

IvyPanda . (2024) '124 Ernest Hemingway Essay Topic Ideas & Examples'. 28 February.

IvyPanda . 2024. "124 Ernest Hemingway Essay Topic Ideas & Examples." February 28, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/ernest-hemingway-essay-topics/.

1. IvyPanda . "124 Ernest Hemingway Essay Topic Ideas & Examples." February 28, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/ernest-hemingway-essay-topics/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "124 Ernest Hemingway Essay Topic Ideas & Examples." February 28, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/ernest-hemingway-essay-topics/.

• Quicksearch
• Search Library Catalog (Orbis)
• Search Law Library Catalog (MORRIS)
• Search Borrow Direct
• Search WorldCat
• Search Articles+
• Search Digital Collections
• Search Archives at Yale
• Research Guides
• Find Databases by Title
• Find eJournals by Title
• Guide to Using Special Collections
• Your Personal Librarian
• Subject Specialists
• Research Support and Workshops
• Citation Tools
• OverDrive: Popular Audio and eBooks
• Get It @ Yale (Borrow Direct, Interlibrary Loan, Scan & Deliver)
• Course Reserves
• Off-Campus Access
• Bass Media Equipment

Libraries & Collections

• Arts Library
• Bass Library
• Beinecke Library
• Classics Library
• Divinity Library
• Film Study Center
• Fortunoff Archive
• Humanities Collections
• International Collections
• Law Library
• Lewis Walpole Library
• Library Collection Services
• Manuscripts & Archives
• Map Collection
• Marx Science & Social Science Library
• Medical Library
• Music Library
• Sterling Library
• Yale Center for British Art

Information & Policies

• Library Hours
• Departments & Staff
• Borrowing & Circulation
• Services for Persons with Disabilities
• Copyright Basics
• Scanning, Printing & Copying
• Computers & Wireless
• Library Policies
• About the Library
• Giving to the Library
• Purchase Request
• Working at the Library
• Terms Governing Use of Materials

Copies of Ernest Hemingway correspondence

Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library > Mary Welsh Hemingway papers (YCAL MSS 392) > Series I: Correspondence > Copies of Ernest Hemingway correspondence

Description

Item location.

• THIS ITEM Copies of Ernest Hemingway correspondence

Access And Usage Rights

Identifiers.

• View in Mirador
• Download as PDF
• Systems Status
• Privacy Policy
• Accessibility at Yale